


Truce

by kyanve



Series: Truce [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Allura is the most terrifying thing in the galaxy, Character Death, Coran for Space Dad, Gen, He's obviously not going to have a lot of current appearances buuutttt..., I clearly need to write AU's or something to get the chance to do more with Ulaz., I have a dumb fondness for all of the side characters ever, Lance's existence might single-handedly justify the teen-and-up rating, PTSD, Red loves his/her/its idiot but has no sympathy for his bullshit sometimes, SPOILERS SPOILERS EVERYWHERE, alien alcohol counts as alcohol, also vivid nightmares involving major character death, and then shiro's nightmares were responsible for changing my archive warnings, comic canon included, get this team allura included a therapist 2017, give Hunk a raise for dealing with everyone else's shit, hunk is the best adjusted of the group, i simultaneously apologize and regret nothing, keith broods like a chicken, kolivan and antok attempting to herd the children, medical horror implications, mild identity screws, nobody wants Zarkon in their head, non-nightmare violence, pidge and keith paranoia bonding, season 3 spoilers starting Ch. 29, shiro's nightmares, slav is slav, thanks shiro, the blade did not sign up for this, the lions damn well should count as characters, the mice also count, the mice are equal opportunity traitors, the tags are probably going to get more ridiculous as I get pieces cleaned up and postable, the team is a bunch of train wreck children, there aren't any non-canon character deaths?, they gave us a perfectly good implication of psychic relays and I'm gonna run with it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-09
Updated: 2018-09-04
Packaged: 2018-10-01 11:49:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 34
Words: 202,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10189274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyanve/pseuds/kyanve
Summary: "EVERYONE SHOULD BE ABLE TO SEE IN EVERYONE ELSE'S HEADHOLES!"  - because that feels like one of a few things that needs exploring.The new team can be a perfectly good one, but the odds of finding any five people who don't know each other THAT well who'll be thrilled with being mentally linked to giant sapient mechanical god-beasts and each other is basically nonexistent.  It's a recipe for whacking heads into it, avoiding it, trying to pretend it's not there, and generally making an already awkward train wreck of a situation more awkward and confusing.Keith as main PoV because I would go insane doing this from more than one PoV and it would turn into more of a novel than it's already looking like it'll be, and who better to explore "sudden unasked for mental links to other beings" than someone with abandonment issues and trust issues everywhere *and* a few good big secrets?This starts around beginning of canon and I have parts to clean up and post going all the way through Season 2; it's weaving through almost entirely off-camera things and side events.  Spoilers bloody everywhere.





	1. If you pretend you can't see them, they can't see you, right?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Intro part for the entire thing before it gets into proper scene format, then Pidge and Keith having some Garrison conspiracy bonding, and an attempt at broody-chicken-fussing at Shiro about some of his issues.
> 
> Runs around/through the end of Return of the Gladiator.

Red made a very pointed lesson when Keith finally found the lion.

Commands and just assuming Red would follow, trying to get through the barrier by force of will, were all ignored. He’d spent two years with strange dreams of fire, flashing claws, and distant roars, being called to weird corners of the desert, but once he found the lion, trying to walk up and command it was soundly rejected, earning him nothing more than a cold sense of disdain in the sudden silence. He'd been frustrated, angry, and desperate with the drones behind him, and it didn't accomplish anything. 

It wasn’t out loud, but he was still calling out when debris knocked him out into space - only it had changed to a plea for help in sudden awareness of how small and vulnerable he really was.

The lion was bigger, the lion was older, the lion would not be commanded by something smaller that assumed authority, but the moment he’d set aside the idea that he was commanding a machine, the cold distance had bloomed into a warm blaze with enough size and power to envelop him. The vague call that had dogged him for the last two years became a very distinct presence with a rumbling purr of approval. It was impossible to ignore and weirdly easy to all but lean into the brief feeling that after an entire lifetime spent displaced and never fitting anywhere, he’d finally found where he belonged.

Then he noticed that he could feel the other lions through Red - three bright, active beings joining him in making the escape, with one more dim still-asleep one below. 

And what had to be everyone else except Shiro, all focused the same direction, a realization that jarred him out of the moment. Getting tied mentally to a giant mechanical god-beast was one thing, getting tied mentally to a bunch of people he didn’t really know or even necessarily get along with was another and was something he flinched away from when he realized it was a thing, even if it did get a sense of a tiredly exasperated rumble and a warm pressure from the lion. 

For a while Keith wasn’t even sure who else had realized it was going on. It was easy to second-guess most of the impressions, and nobody was used to working with a giant demigod-machine in their heads communicating in ways that humans weren’t built for. Even when they were in the lions, the sense of the others was often subtle or hard to put words and normal concepts to. He wasn’t even sure sometimes if something he realized about one of the others was a thing he’d noticed normally or something where edges had blurred somewhere enough for it to leak across the relay.

And that, in and of itself, was terrifying, because it meant the others had the potential to do the same to him. 

Keith had plenty to hide. He had a knife made of an unknown metal with an alien rune on the hilt that glowed when he held it, the legacy of a father he’d barely known and a mother he didn't remember at all. He had medical records where anything beyond a cursory physical could be summed up with “fuck if we know”, and had figured out “I might not be entirely human” early enough that chasing conspiracy theories and space exploration had been a mad quest to make sense of who and what he was - that somewhere there’d be answers among the stars that he couldn’t find on Earth. He’d wandered the castle once looking at various signs and inscriptions, passing it off as restless exploration; none of the Altaean writing resembled whatever was on the knife.

There was a lot he didn’t want to admit to himself either, that he was less good at burying. Unknown to him it usually made a smokescreen on the relay covering “I don’t think I’m entirely human”, even though he’d be unsure what he wanted overheard less if he did acknowledge and admit any of it to himself. There was the isolation of having only ever had one person as a stable presence he could trust or get attached to, and having just been through two years of having that taken away. There were paranoid instincts that expected anyone that interacted with him enough to turn on him or want nothing to do with him or to otherwise vanish, like everyone else in his life had done before.

There was fear of letting people close enough for them to be able to hurt him when they proved him right, wanting someone to prove him wrong but not knowing what to do if someone besides Shiro did, fear of screwing up if he did let someone in and driving them off because he didn’t know what he was doing. He’d done a damn good job convincing himself he was content being alone, but it was one of those internal lies more for his dubious benefit than anyone else’s.

He thought - hoped - that he and Red had done well enough at filtering to not share things he didn’t want to talk about. It didn’t seem that hard to let everything else fall away and just exist in the cockpit anyway, focus on what was going on around them and what the goal was; battles and attempts at training were a good getaway from the inside of his own head.

But the others came through painfully loud anyway, even if much of it didn't sink in until after Sendak's ship crashed and they were safe. 

 

Pidge was channeling a sort of single-minded obsession into everything she did. “Worry” didn’t seem like the right word for it since it was more like a determination to tear the entire galaxy apart to find the family she was missing. She didn’t really hide that part, either, even if she wasn't talking about it much. It was, however, wrapped up in a ball of paranoia she _was_ trying to hide, that she was there under a fake identity, that everyone else would realize she wasn’t who she said she was and would turn on her, and that part was a present enough twitch that it was like she was broadcasting a demand to not look at the pink elephants. 

Not saying anything about knowing that “Pidge Gunderson, the guy” was a fake construct felt like survival; if he pretended he didn’t notice, then hopefully if she overheard anything of his she’d pretend she didn’t notice. She seemed vengeful enough to do it.

 

Lance was fine when he was too preoccupied to be insecure, perfectly observant and tuned to minding other people and adjusting for them… unfortunately even live fire wasn’t always enough to keep him preoccupied enough to not be insecure. There were image issues and fears about keeping up an appearance and a persona, imposter syndrome issues and fears that anything he did right was setting himself up to fail, fear of failure and circling it as an inevitability he had a hard time looking away from once it occurred to him. 

There was the running twitch of always being the one passed over or not as good as someone else, an ego made up of overcompensation and trying to “prove” he was “good enough” where Keith wasn’t sure who he was trying to convince harder that he was capable, everyone else or himself. Adding that Lance was keenly aware that while he’d been in fighter pilot training, the Garrison was still focused on more civilian exploration and research than military action like what they were getting into, and it just added another layer of “I don’t want anyone to realize I don’t know what I’m doing but Oh God I Don’t Know What I’m Doing”. Keith wasn’t sure how he’d become the embodiment of “Everything Lance wanted to be but wasn’t good enough to pull off”, either, but he was tempted to try to find a way to reach through the relay, grab Lance by the mental shoulders, and shake him until that fell out.

Lance didn’t trust himself enough to recognize when he was picking up on something over the relay. He definitely didn’t realize how much of his reactions and impressions leaked onto it, and there were a few times Keith didn’t even realize he was bristling at it until there was a warm sort of weight like Red was putting a mental paw on his head with a not-actually-audible rumble to settle. 

The Red Lion was very aware of Keith's issues and had silent fond commiseration with Blue over their new Paladins, the relative children both growling at what was essentially seeing mirrors for their insecurities in each other and then growling at the growling to avoid admitting they’d seen themselves in it. Neither Lion was sharing this with their Paladin beyond exasperated fondness and quiet nudging when it got too loud in the cockpit. The new Paladins weren’t the highly trained, skilled, experienced and established heroes the old ones had been, and that might be for the better after what had happened before - the lions had the chance to mold something growing so that it learned to be flexible and survive, instead of being handed something already settled and brittle enough to break unexpectedly. 

 

Hunk was the one that was the easiest for Keith to just exist in the area of for the most part; no identity issues, no image issues, no potential for a revenge rampage any minute or overcompensating ego.

Hunk also didn’t have the insecurity about his own image to care if it was noticeable that military action in a giant alien god-mecha wasn’t what he was trained for, and was prone to weaving in between “what am I doing here I have no idea why I’m here what am I even doing I want to go home” and worrying about everyone else. There wasn’t really anything he seemed to care to hide.

 

When the Black Lion awakened and brought Shiro into the relay, Keith gained a renewed appreciation for just what a mess his old friend had become. Some of it wasn’t even new; Shiro had always been exceptionally good at handling people, observant, with good judgment and a sense of practicality, all of which he took for granted as ‘I’m just doing what anyone would do’. 

Shiro had also always been the sort of person who would actually try to deflect and downplay anything positive said about him if he had the chance, a perfectionist that sold himself short. Him getting on the relay had just confirmed Keith’s long-running suspicion that it wasn’t just “trying to be polite and show humility”, but that Shiro honestly believed that he was mostly just someone average without any real skills that was only doing the basic minimum out of responsibility to others. No concept of his own value, and no concept of how important he was to others, either, but perfectly willing to throw himself in between others and danger at the drop of a pin. One of Shiro's worst and loudest fears was for everyone else - one of the others getting hurt would be a tragedy, him getting hurt would just be a thing that happened.

The trauma was a new factor, a running undercurrent of panic and fight-or-flight that never actually went away; always in some corner of Shiro’s mind he was on edge for something to go wrong or a threat to appear, always partly exhausted from never feeling like it was safe to honestly rest, torn between relief and elation over being able to do simple everyday things again and “this won’t last, it can’t last, something horrible will happen, they’ll catch up, this will all be taken away again”, with a bonus thread of fear of what he’d become. 

 

*********************

 

“ _That was my father and brother on the Kerberos mission._ ”

He’d always been bad at paying attention to some of the people around Shiro. Shiro had known half the Garrison, and Keith had been his shadow before he graduated that mostly stayed a backdrop element when other people were around unless someone was raising alarm flags or threatening Shiro. He had the nagging realization after Pidge had snapped those words that he’d met Matt a few times, and just hadn’t paid much attention because there wasn’t anything to grab his attention. He wasn't sure it was worth bringing up "I might have known your brother as one of the people who hung out with Shiro but I don't remember him that well". 

He’d been at the Kerberos launch to see Shiro off. He was trying to remember if he’d paid enough attention to the rest of the family and friends to have seen Pidge there.

Or whoever Pidge really was. 

The obsessive focus and everyone else being means to an end that she had should have bothered him, maybe, but he’d been doing something similar since Kerberos, and probably still would be if it hadn’t been Shiro in that pod. 

And that was why he’d restlessly found his tablet, fished through it to make sure he had his own research on the Kerberos disappearance with him, and dug out the couple server drives he’d stolen from the Garrison on his way out from among his very few worldly possessions. With those in hand, he walked off to find Pidge. 

Pidge’s room was locked and unoccupied, the kitchen was empty, and Red finally nudged a direction which he followed - to the cryobay in the lower levels, where the rescued alien prisoners were. There were voices, and he flattened against the wall to wait.

One was definitely Corran, but he couldn’t quite make out what the man was saying; the Altaean was too far inside the room. Then there was Shiro’s voice from by the door - “They’re safe now, so we can afford to wait.”

“I know but - we could be so close, and what if something happens? What if something’s already happened?”

Corran’s muffled voice again.

“…yeah, I know. It’s just hard not to worry, you know?”

“If we’re careless about this, we’ll just end up caught ourselves, and I’m sure your father and brother don’t want that. All we can do is trust them to hold out until we can find them.” There was a tired edge to Shiro’s calm confidence, and Keith was pretty sure it was less real confidence and more grim necessity.

There was silence, but whatever went on must not have put things more on edge, because Shiro continued a minute later - “We should all get some rest - you too, Pidge. You can’t help anyone if you’re passing out.”

Shiro walked out and Keith froze, stiffening by the wall awkwardly. Shiro definitely noticed him, but stuck with a quiet wave and an acknowledging nod as he walked by back toward the elevator. 

Corran passed by a minute later, raising a questioning eyebrow at him. He held up the few small devices in his arm and pointed back toward the room Pidge was still in; Corran nodded and continued on. 

Once the elevator left, he ducked around the corner into the cryobay.

All of the tubes were occupied by a range of ragged looking aliens; Pidge was sitting next to one of the tubes with a box of Altaean parts and her own backpack, going still and watching him warily as he came in. 

He waved, awkwardly shifting the few pieces of tech in his arm. “..hey. How’s your laptop battery holding out?”

“Kinda shitty, but I’ve almost got an adapter to charge it off the Castle.” She gestured to the box of Altaean parts. 

He sat cross legged in front of where she was working, trying not to be too conscious of the suspicious glare he was getting. He shifted the server drives out, setting the five thin cards on the crate she was using as a workspace; she squinted at them, mouthing something to herself as she studied them.

“…those are from the Garrison’s server room.”

“Yeah. Two of them should have information on the Kerberos mission, the other three I just grabbed randomly so they’d have a harder time telling what I was after.” He rubbed the back of his head. “…I was in a bit too much of a hurry to label which was which when I grabbed them.”

She looked up at him, raising an eyebrow. “And here I’d heard your ‘disciplinary issue’ was getting in too many fights or something.”

He shrugged with a lopsided grin. “Yeah, figures they wouldn’t want to talk about it, after the mess I made covering my exit.” With one hand he nudged the drives closer. “I don’t know how useful these will be now that we’re here, but you can probably get more out of them than I ever could.”

She picked them up one at a time, sliding them into her laptop’s bag with cursory inspections. “How did you even get these?”

“EMP grenades on the doors and a couple command offices, some glue bombs in other places for diversions, then fireworks and some other small explosions to draw attention the wrong way when I went over the wall.” It had taken him a few weeks to collect parts and setup for after they’d announced the Kerberos mission ‘lost to pilot error’, and he was still proud of it.

Pidge finally cracked a smile. “Oh man, I just missed it - I got back in a few weeks after and people were still complaining!” 

“Got back in?” 

There was a brief beat as she realized she’d slipped, but she recovered fast, lacing fingers behind her head and leaning back. “Yeah, Iverson tried to kick me out for asking too many questions about the Kerberos mission. It didn't work.”

And that probably explained the entire fake identity thing right there. “Fucking Iverson. I think he expected me to try to deck him when he fed me that ‘pilot error’ line, and man I wanted to. We hated each other.”

“Really? To hear him talk you were his favorite pet.”

“…that figures somehow. Asshole hated to admit when he didn’t have control over something.” It was entirely possible that Iverson did think of Keith as a pet favorite student, but that somehow only pissed him off more about the whole thing. 

“You were the top of the class. Nearly model cadet, too, besides getting into fights.” 

He shrugged. “I didn’t have a lot else going on before the Kerberos mission disappeared.”

She gave him an odd look, there was a brief shift staring at the door speculatively, and then she opted for turning her attention to the tablet still in his lap. “Any reason you brought that?”

He shifted it to his hands. “…I have copies of my own research on here, but I’d rather just copy the files to your laptop - there’s a lot of other things on here.”

She nodded, looking slightly disappointed. “I’ve almost got something to power our stuff. It’s whatever you’d been digging up when you found the Blue Lion’s caves?”

He nodded. “Going a little further back, but it’s everything I managed to find that didn’t sound like crackpot raving or modernist supremacist bullshit, plus my own documentation of a few other places with paintings and carvings that stood out.”

“I saw some of your books around the shack.” She leaned her chin on one hand. “I didn’t realize it went back before Kerberos, though - most people too involved in conspiracy theories don’t last long around serious research places like the Garrison.”

“It’s just always been a thing.” He tucked the tablet back under one arm; that was straying dangerously close to things he didn’t want to talk about. “Anyway hopefully there’ll be something on their server drives with some clue to help find your family. Just let me know when you’ve got the charger working and I’ll pass you the rest of it.”

Keith stood up; Pidge was giving him an almost unreadable gauging look, but wasn’t mustering enough interest to chase it. “Sure thing. Thanks for the help.”

He just nodded and headed out, back toward his room for the night.

 

**************

 

The relay drew attention to how bad off Shiro was, but it wasn’t hard to catch via mundane observation. The first few days he’d gone to check on Shiro and caught moments of startle when the door to Shiro’s room opened - a brief beat where there was a faint high-pitched whine followed by a flicker of glowing violet along Shiro’s arm and in his eyes that left Keith freezing in the door, waiting the couple breaths for recognition to sink in. He hadn’t been around Shiro in a fight to see the alterations in action yet, but he could read the stance Shiro’d snapped into enough to guess that the prosthetic had been weaponized. 

And then there was Shiro’s face and posture falling into a mix of worry and guilt as he realized he’d almost reacted violently.

Keith stepped into the room, tapping the panel on the wall to bring the lights up, all the more determined to act normal; Shiro was a mess, but Shiro was still Shiro, and he opted for acting as if nothing had happened in the hopes it would distract Shiro from his own snarls. “Hey, you’re late for breakfast. I thought I’d come check on you.” He held his right hand down to help Shiro up; it looked like the other pilot had fallen asleep half-dressed on the bed. 

“I guess I slept in.” He sat up, starting to reach over to accept Keith’s hand with the prosthetic, then flinched; Keith leaned forward just enough to catch his cold metal wrist anyway. Shiro froze, then swallowed the flinch, accepting the help but trying to keep as much weight away from it as he could. As soon as he was standing and Keith had let his wrist go, he frowned, flexing the mechanical hand and staring down at it. 

Keith frowned, eyes flickering between Shiro’s face and the metal hand. “It’s not that big of a deal.”

Shiro cringed, shooting Keith a flat, irritated look.

Keith just straightened, completely ignoring being noticeably shorter, and returned it; he was still making sense of how to approach interactions that weren’t confrontations sometimes, but that didn’t stop him from trying to kludge holding ground and daring the other party to argue with him into a weapon against Shiro's insecurities. “No really. I know it’s been a while and a lot happened, but you’re still you. I’d love to take pieces out of them for whatever they did to you, and I know you didn’t ask for it, but that’s your arm now.” 

Shiro’s expression fell, and his voice dropped quieter, the agitation settling toward a worried frown at his own mechanical hand. “That doesn’t mean you should be so careless about it.” 

Keith tipped his head to the hand, hanging onto his challenge. “You didn’t seem to be that worried about it back on Earth.” 

The hand clenched with the faint sound of moving mechanisms and Shiro snapped, “That was before I remembered what it was.”

Keith raised his eyebrow, giving a defiant shrug. Shiro made a frustrated noise, grimacing and not finding words. He stood to start walking past Keith, pointedly keeping Keith on his good side to grab the younger Paladin’s shoulder with his good hand and tug. “Come on.”

Shiro led out of the dorms toward the training deck in a tense stalk, silent and only glancing sideways occasionally to make sure he was keeping Keith on his good side; Keith followed, stubbornly keeping close and not bothering to put any effort into minding which side he was walking on. 

“Stay by the door so it doesn’t think you’re volunteering.” Shiro pointed, tone firm; Keith leaned against the wall, arms folded. He wasn’t unarmed exactly, but his knife didn’t have the reach of his bayard and Shiro was apparently trying to make a point. The lights had come on as they entered, the computer clearly waiting. “Single opponent simulation, training level four.”

It was a low growl of a tone he’d never heard from Shiro before Kerberos, but one that had crept in a few times since the escape, usually when Shiro was talking about his former captors.

The faint whine came a half-second before the violet light did, engulfing Shiro’s hand and most of the prosthetic, with a few streaks that went past it. The training robot was fast and at a setting to be exceptionally vicious, but the bout didn’t last long anyway. Shiro more than matched its efficient ferocity to carve it into pieces with the prosthetic, the edges of the broken machine faintly melted. 

Keith caught Shiro making a cautious glance up to the empty control room, a brief reflex as he turned, the light flickering out of the prosthetic with a lower sound that lingered a couple beats after the weapon augmentation had deactivated. His expression was a grim scowl, raising the metal hand up in front of him as if it’d be its own point. “It’s activated on its own before, and I don’t know how to control it.”

Keith tilted his head, studying the metal hand. Shiro had barely seemed to think about having a prosthetic before the mission to get Red; he’d acted completely normal about it except for flexing it and studying it in perturbed confusion when he thought nobody was looking, as if he’d been trying to avoid thinking about it most of the time. Afterwards, he still tried to act normal about it, but Keith had caught little moments of him being more delicate about it, shifting to keep it away from people when he wasn’t being watched, holding it away as much as he could without drawing attention.

Which meant it must’ve activated during the mission while they were on the Galra ship, in a combat situation; it’d seemed to be under control for the training bot, and the brief flickers of activation Keith had seen were when Shiro was startled and not expecting another person. It was a Hell of a powerful weapon to give a prisoner, which meant they must’ve thought they had control over him, and if they thought they owned him, they wouldn’t want him randomly wrecking his surroundings or being a source of friendly fire - so it was probably reacting to whether or not Shiro felt threatened or had an enemy target, as an extension of Shiro’s will and emotional state. 

The last thing Shiro wanted was to hurt him or anyone else that wasn’t a threat, and that was something he was willing to gamble on.

He walked across the deck, to stand in front of Shiro, studying the prosthetic; he really would love to take pieces off them for what they’d done to Shiro. Shiro seemed to be waiting for his reaction, although the firm set of his stance gave the impression he thought he had control over the situation, or at least had made the point he’d intended - that the prosthetic was something to be afraid of.

That Keith should be afraid of what he'd become.

Keith reached up fast to grab the hand, folding his inside the fingers and hanging on with a grip he could only get away with on metal; Shiro blanched and flinched, pulling back as he’d expected, but he’d at least guessed right that there wouldn’t be heat beyond “noticeably warm” now that it was deactivated. The mechanical strength mixed with how much Shiro had on him in height and weight was enough to pull him half off balance as his old friend tried to pull away, the grim scowl quickly replaced with confused panic. He seemed to realize he’d pulled Keith off balance, and froze, almost turning paler and looking faintly queasy.

Keith leaned in, not giving any room for Shiro to break eye contact, glaring right back. “You are not a monster. I’ve known you for too long to not trust you, and whatever this is, it’s still your hand now - you do control it.” 

Shiro blanched, mouth forming empty words for a minute, then wilted, turning his head to look away; the tension went out, and Keith found himself holding up the extra weight of the metal hand gone limp in his own as Shiro gave up on trying to pull away. “You don’t know that.” Then, with a sideways glance back and enough weariness for ten years, “I wish you weren’t so careless about it.”

“Give me some credit.” He relaxed some of his own posture at least to be less in Shiro’s face, shifting his grip on the metal hand to be a little easier to support instead of fighting against it getting pulled away, and his own expression softened. “You remember where I lived, right? I’ve had rattlesnakes come in during monsoon to sleep under the wood stove in that shack and I never got bit. I can take care of myself.” 

“Rattlesnakes give warning.” It was delivered with the kind of lopsided weak smile Shiro did when he was trying to pass something off as a joke that really wasn’t. It only got an unimpressed eyebrow raise.

“It comes on when you’re expecting a fight. I’m not going to sneak up on you.” He ran his thumb over the back of the metal, tracing the shape of the metal - it didn’t quite match the shape of a human hand anymore. “You’re not a monster, Shiro.”

Shiro gave a weak, broken laugh. “Well I’m definitely not all human anymore.”

For a moment, Keith just opted for a pointed, offended eyebrow raise - Shiro had been the only person he’d ever talked to about his own confusing mess. Shiro went confused, the kind of uncertain ‘did I do something wrong’ expression Keith hadn’t seen cross his face since before Kerberos; it drug up a weird ache, something he’d never thought he’d be relieved to see after all the time he’d spent trying to get Shiro to stop trying to go hyper-responsible guilt over stupid things. “You don’t remember, do you.” 

Shiro shook his head, still teetering on being a mess of guilt and worry.

“…I’ll catch you back up later.” It wasn’t really something he wanted to talk about in the training bay, where there were almost definitely records kept and cameras going, nevermind the risk of someone else walking in. “Will you trust me that I know how to take care of myself?”

There was finally a tired, sad, worried return to eye contact, and a faint nod. Keith gave a faint smile and reached up with his other hand, very carefully and deliberately moving the metal hand to rest on his collarbone where it could’ve easily gone around his throat. Shiro stiffened, but didn’t fight it, although he did seem close to freezing again. Keith kept one hand over the back of the metal one, holding it in place while Shiro was very carefully keeping it open.

“See? It’s still your hand. You’re not going to hurt any of us. And…you could use to relax a little more.” He gave the back of the metal hand a gentle pat.

Shiro sighed. “I’ll try.” He gave the metal hand an uncomfortable glance. “…Can I have it back now?”

Keith pulled his hands off, holding them both up and open. Shiro gave him a wary look for a few long beats before he finally slowly pulled the prosthetic hand back, rubbing the wrist of it with his good hand and flexing the mechanical fingers with a frown. It was harder for him to keep arguing when Keith was actually smiling, even if there was that streak of smug to it; he awkwardly gave the younger man a pat on the shoulder with the mechanical hand. “Let’s…just go get something to eat, alright?”

As they left the training bay, Keith felt a faint flicker from the flame that now seemed to always occupy the back of his mind, warmth with an approving purr.

*********************

After the first monster, there was no way the rest of the team hadn’t noticed it; Shiro using his own flashback to plan around was something Black couldn’t filter out, not when they were getting traced through a partial re-enactment and all tied together as Voltron. The weight of it to everyone else was blunted a little by the lions, but it was still too-real of a shared memory; the smell of blood, ozone, and metal, the shifting give of sand underfoot. It would’ve been impossible to second-guess or filter through as a subconscious awareness. 

It crystallized Shiro’s nagging fear of himself. Keith wasn’t sure if anyone else caught the bits of Shiro seeing a mirror in the monster, the sudden much more personal horror of applying it to himself and to his own alterations, but he’d certainly noticed it, particularly when he'd already started trying to get Shiro pulled away from the looming potential for self-loathing. The “monster” Shiro was afraid of being - afraid he’d almost been - had a face and form now, a reality and gravity that hadn’t existed before.

Keith considered calling Shiro out on what he'd heard over the relay a few times, just to shake the man and yell that he wasn’t the monster the Galra had apparently wanted, he was important, he was really that capable, but that would prove to be surprisingly difficult to manage. Shiro was very good at acting like he had everything together most of the time, and he definitely wasn't going to try to corner Shiro too much around any of the others. Red stayed mostly silent but did seem to approve of his intent to continue fumbling through how to help someone who he’d never had to think of before as that kind of wounded.

The flashback had another effect on the entire group. Nobody wanted to admit to the very real likelihood they were all losing the privacy of their own minds with people they mostly barely knew, whether they were aware of how much it was already happening passively or not. That was when it crystallized into the unspoken truce - don’t bring up anything about someone else they’re not talking about themselves, don’t draw attention to it.

Keep the lid on Pandora's box, if you pretend you can't see anyone else then they'll pretend they don't see you.


	2. Confused what I feel with something that's real

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Weaving around the Fall of the Castle/Balmera episodes, with the Arusian celebration and some of the immediate aftermath. 
> 
> Shiro is absolutely capable of being a shit, Hunk is seriously trying to mitigate some of the fighting but he can only do so much. Pidge and Keith's weird overprotective paranoid not-quite bonding continues to entertain me more than it probably should. Keith also gets an important lesson about the mice, and finally getting to Allura, too.

He wandered out after getting a shower planning on checking on Shiro, early in the day after the monster had fallen. He found Shiro standing at the top of the castle’s stairs, looking dumbfounded at the open gates and the flurry of traffic from the village. Lance and Pidge weren’t out yet, but Hunk was making trips with the Arusians, bringing in stacks of lidded baskets and kegs that the Arusians were carrying one at a time, sometimes in teams. Allura was in the middle of it with the Arusian chief, and Corran occasionally appeared from the direction of the castle’s kitchens and storage areas. The sun shone bright outside, casting the castle’s shadow long over the outside; it was a calm day and still early. 

“What’s all of this?” He stood next to Shiro on the man’s left and motioned at the great hall.

“Apparently the Arusian chief insisted on a celebration in our honor, and Allura invited them to have it here.” Shiro seemed bewildered by all of it.

“Wow.” He wasn’t sure how to react; he hadn’t really thought about what they were doing past the immediate battles and threats - and the enormity of what they were up against. 

It figured now that he thought about it; to them, it was scraping to survive now that Zarkon knew they were there, but to the Arusians, this was their entire world. 

It also hadn’t been his goal in seeking others out that evening. “How’re you holding up?” 

Shiro blinked, giving him a blank look.

“I mean - you’ve been having a hard time remembering things, and having something like that come back seems kind of rough…”. He made a few vague hand gestures, trying to fumble through not admitting he’d overheard the memory pretty vividly.

Shiro frowned, and there was a sort of tension that seeped into his posture that made Keith regret bringing it up; he flexed the mechanical hand, a faint whir of mechanisms barely audible over the other noise. “I’m fine.”

He wrinkled his nose, eyes narrowing. “You don’t sound fine.” 

Shiro shifted weight, looking like he’d just bitten into a lemon rind. “Really. It’s fine. I’ll live.”

Keith frowned, almost glaring, then shifted to lean in closer, resting a hand on the mechanical wrist; Shiro flinched slightly with a quiet frustrated noise. “You don’t have to try to tough through this like that, you know.”

Shiro looked down at him, dubious. “It happened. Nothing’s going to change that. I’m not sure what you want me to do.”

“I don’t know. It’s just-” 

He cut off at the sound of footsteps hurrying up the stairs towards them, both Paladins snapping attention toward the disturbance. 

Klaixap was running up the stairs, leading two other Arusians who were carrying a wooden cask as big as either of them. Klaixap’s bone sword was slung across his back, and the other two each had bags slung over their shoulders. 

Klaixap drew his sword, holding it up and slowly waving it in the salute-and-kneel he’d done for Allura before. “Honored Black Paladin of the Paladins of Voltron!” 

Shiro stared down, looking somewhere between a cat standing on tinfoil and a blue screened drone waiting for someone to mash the reboot button.

“In honor of your victory and the salvation of our village from the foul monster, we offer you the first tap of our prized fifty-turn casque of oonhai!”

Klaixap stood, sheathing his sword and turning to take a mug about the size of a large coffee cup from the bag of one of the others, working a small valve to fill it with some kind of dark opaque maroon liquid from the cask, then held it up to Shiro with his head bowed. Shiro took it from his hands, and Klaixap looked up, between both of them, and turned to look back at the other two. One of them made an odd half-gesture with one arm, and Klaixap fished another mug out, filling it and stepping around Shiro to offer it to Keith.

Shiro regarded it awkwardly, then took a deep breath. From the angle Keith was at behind him, he was visibly only miming drinking it, but he did a good enough job to fool the Arusians, who could only see the bottom of the cup and had to crane their heads to look up. Keith looked down at his cup; Hunk had been cooking with plants from this world, and they’d had Arusian food before visiting the village so it had to be something humans could manage, and the Arusians were tiny enough that he thought it was impossible any alcohol of theirs would do that much to a human. He drained the mug; it was some kind of sharp, rich fruit with a heavy herbal bite, somewhere between sangria and jaeger in taste.

Shiro smiled, bowing his head. “Thank you. It’s wonderful.” 

Keith, on the other side of him, was finding that it was a creeping sort of alcohol, but one that was already making him regret his assumptions about alien biology. “I haven’t had anything like that in a while.”

The three Arusians lit up happily, bowing in unison - the two with the cask as well as they could. Keith was starting to feel guilty about how he’d reacted to Klaixap initially, and stepped around Shiro to more easily address the small aliens.

“Listen, Klaixap - about when y’first came up to the castle.” 

Klaixap puffed his chest out. “Klaixap will remember that day proudly forever - to be not only recognized by the Lion Goddess, but considered a worthy opponent by a Paladin of the Great Lions of Voltron!”

Keith had a brief, off balance pause, trying to re-orient his reactions. “Yeah. Yeah, you are a worthy opponent, and it’s been an honor.” He gave the little alien a salute; Klaixap somehow managed to light up in elation even more, and returned the salute fairly well for only having seen it once from someone on their way to drunk. 

The three Arusians turned and ran back down the stairs with a cheerful bounce, bringing the cask to where the rest of the food and drink were being set up. 

“I’ve never had anyone that happy that I threatened them before.”, he commented, dazed.

Shiro turned back to Keith and did a double-take between the younger Paladin and his mug, carefully keeping his voice down. “You drank all of it?”

“They’re so _tiny_. I didn’t think anything of theirs’d be that strong.” His voice wobbled in confused disbelief.

Shiro shook his head, bemused - and trying not to comment on the beginnings of a drawl Keith was lapsing into. “And?”

“…That’s gotta be forty proof at least.”

There was a long pause while Shiro was visibly considering teasing him about it, then just glanced down to make sure nobody was watching them that closely. He tugged Keith’s hand with the mug where it would be harder to see, Keith complying and holding his hand where Shiro indicated.

Then Shiro poured his mug into Keith’s empty one, refilling it, and walked off down the stairs, whistling smugly. 

He stayed at the top of the stairs by the main doors out of the great hall, staring at the mug. It was a good two minutes before he realized that Shiro had just weaseled out of an attempt at fussing over him _and_ pawned off more of the alien liquor on him. Keith muttered a couple choice swear words into the mug, sipping on it; Red shared the moment with more tired exasperation and the idea of waiting - Shiro couldn’t dodge like that forever. 

The door opened behind him, and he turned sharply to find Lance, blinking at him blankly. “What’s all the commotion?”

“The Arusians’re throwing a party in our honor.” He motioned behind him at the bustle in the great hall, balance wobbling a little.

Lance squinted, leaning forward on the balls of his feet to study Keith and the Arusian mug. “….are you drunk?”

“No!” He paused, glancing down at the mug. “Maybe. Yeah.” 

Lance stifled a laugh, covering his face. 

“Look they gave Shiro the first out of some keg an’then they gave me a cup too? An’I didn’t want to insult them so I drank it. Then Shiro faked’em out stead of drinking it and dumped his drink in my cup when they weren’t looking.” He held up his half-full mug and made a couple angry gestures back at the door, where Shiro’s black armor was visible leaning in the entrance.

The stifling failed, but Lance was still trying to cover his face to keep it low. “So they brought out the good stuff, eh?” 

He looked down at the mug and shrugged, taking another swallow. “Yep.”

“Well if they’re doing all this for us, we shouldn’t keep them waiting.” Lance puffed up proud, walking down the stairs; Keith gave the mug another thoughtful glance and followed after. 

Klaixap presented Lance with one of the clay mugs with less ceremony but with the honorifics and titles, which Lance was all too happy to accept; Hunk broke away from helping with the food table to come over, looking happier than Keith had ever seen him…Not like that was hard when he’d only known the guy for a few days of live combat and getting hijacked far from home. Lance found a part of the sweeping wall of the stairs to lean on with the drink. The hall was starting to fill with happy chatter from what had to be most of the Arusian village, small aliens waving to them and bowing in passing all over. 

“I could get used to this.” Lance seemed, at least for the moment, oddly content. 

“Yeah. I mean, I could do without getting shot at, but you know… look at how happy they are! And they’re all alive and okay because of us.” Hunk had probably already been introduced to the Arusian liquor, although it was hard to tell; it didn’t seem to have hit him very hard.

“It’s a little weird to think about.” Keith didn’t realize he'd said it out loud until he realized both of the others were looking at him expectantly. He took another swallow of his drink, making a few emphatic awkward hand gestures. “The first thing I found about any of this was a few Neolithic carvings ‘bout ‘sky warriors’ who were fighting these tall monsters with yellow eyes and sharp teeth - which’d be about when the Altaeans hid Blue on Earth, an’ humans were just getting the hang of making tools, so it was probably Galra… now here we are, bein’ the ‘sky warriors’ for some other planet. Like we’re gonna be the legends they pass down ‘till they catch up to erryone else in the stars.”

There was silence, and he was suddenly acutely aware of having both of their attention. He was starting to regret opening his mouth, and pretty sure he’d just made an idiot of himself. 

“Man that’s… deep.” Hunk scanned the room soberly. “I dunno if I’m ready to be someone’s legends.” 

Lance squinted at him. “When did you get an accent?”

Keith half-choked on what was left of his drink with a bit-off noise that would’ve been “fuck” if it had gotten out intact, and glared at the drink sourly as if it’d personally betrayed him.

“You’re from Texas?” Hunk was earnest about it, even if Lance looked about ready to crack up laughing at him. 

“Y’mean the Eighth Circle’f Hell? Yeah.” 

Lance was failing, snickering over his drink' Keith shot him a glare. Hunk sighed, rolling his eyes. “That bad, eh?” He almost seemed to be making an effort to keep hold of the conversation before Lance could get over the drunk accent enough to make fun of Keith for it. 

“Look, the Civil War was a couple hundred years ago and y’still see Confederate flags all o’er the place. The rest of the world grew up and moved on in a lot’f ways, but most of Texas wants t’stick its head in the sand an’keep a fucking death grip on every backwards ole prejudice they can. Y’don’t want to know the names I’ve been called on a _good_ day, an’ the racist assholes there aren’t smart enough to realize there’s more than one country in Asia or that a name like ‘Kogane’ ain’t Chinese. The more I can shove that shithole’f a state behind me, the better.” If his drink had been closer to full, he probably would have spilled it with angry hand gestures, and he realized he’d spooked a couple of nearby Arusians who were now staring at him in wide eyed confusion. “It’s nothing to do with y’all. Really. My homeland on our world’s just an awful place.” He made an attempt at soothing hand motions at them; they nodded, bowed, and went back to what they’d been doing. 

“Y’want the rest of this? I think I’ve had enough.” He offered the mug to Lance, who shrugged and took it. 

Lance downed what was left of it, setting the now empty mug aside, smiling slyly. “So should I call you ‘Samurai’ then?” He still seemed mostly sober, and Keith hated him for it a little.

He gave a frustrated noise. “Does any’f what I do with a sword look like any kind of Kendo t’you?”

Lance shrugged, wagging a hand in the air. “Eh. Haven’t paid attention.”

Hunk gave the keg a longing, thoughtful stare.

“I did WMA. Western swordsmanship. Samurai don’t use shields. And my Bayard sure as Hell ain’t a katana.” 

“I don’t think I’d know either - I never really knew much about swords.” Hunk shrugged, with a pointed glance sideways at Lance; Lance rolled his eyes. Keith had to give Hunk credit for trying. “You’ve probably got a head start on the rest of us with those shields, then?”

Hunk at least encouraged a drunken drawl of a detour into how different the energy shields were to handle than a solid metal or wood shield, and different kinds of swords. Lance ignored it for a while and had made it most of the way through his own drink before he checked back into the conversation and it started scattering all over; the Garrison was mostly mercifully avoided besides small things after he'd left and a few editorial comments from him about some of the instructors - anything too direct felt like inviting more of a fight, and he let Hunk steer away every time it veered that way. 

There was less squabbling than normal, and Keith couldn’t tell how much of it was Hunk actively running interference and how much was the two of them being less than sober, but Lance was keeping the mocking and baiting to a lower roar than usual. Even with that, Lance definitely either held his liquor better or was better at playing off being drunk. Whichever it was, Red was purring in his head loud enough that he half expected to see the lion peering in the doors of the castle. 

Keith stuck to water mostly for the evening and the Arusian’s re-enactment of the fight, trying to wait out the buzz; it had gone down to something between the last dregs of ‘drunk’ and the beginning warnings of ‘hung over’ by the time night fell. When Corran brought out the nunvill, he resigned himself to spending the night wasted, only to discover it wasn’t alcohol - it was probably the only thing that could make straight black sludge coffee taste good by comparison and had about as much kick the other way. He’d managed to wrestle the old childhood accent back into submission, but was still feeling loopy enough between Arusian liquor and whatever kind of stimulant nunvill was supposed to be to not care quite as much about how far over his usual quota for human interaction he was sailing. 

Besides, there were opportunities to get digs in at Lance when dealing with the other paladin was less hopelessly aggravating. It was like compensation for time spent around Lance completely sober. 

Red seemed a little exasperated by that part even if she quietly approved of him spending time with the others. She wasn’t really nudging at him over the bits of bickering and teasing that were happening; he pushed a sort of querying thought back at the lion’s presence. 

He got back the impression of them functioning as one unit, the coordination it took to maintain Voltron, and a sort of questioning nudge at his own actual thoughts and feelings on his teammates.

It took him a little longer to come up with a response, even though he wasn’t sure how much of the jumble the lion could read just by ambiently watching; he finally settled on thinking in words instead of vaguely shoving ideas at the lion. _I don’t *hate* him? I mean, he’s an obnoxious shit with a chip on his shoulder and he’s irritating as all fuck, but he doesn’t seem like he’s going to do anything horrible or worth hating. I’ve worked with him so far, do I have to like him?_

The reply was a bemused rumble. 

The Lions knew better than to try to push. The old Paladins had taken for granted that they had all known each other, and had ended up with a long, slow-burn tension as they realized they hadn’t known each other as well as they thought. This group would get the chance to work things out between themselves and then grow together from the start, without the same kind of unexpected volatility. It would take time, but the end result would be stronger, less likely to turn on each other.

For Keith’s part, between Pidge wanting to leave and the explosions starting, he wasn’t sure if he was thankful the buzz had pretty much completely worn down into a tired headache, or all the more ready to murder the causes, even if it was mostly a protective rage. He was definitely thankful the relay was quieter when not in the cockpit, because he didn’t want to remember or be reminded of the part where he was technically hungover when the battle started.

****************************

He volunteered to get Lance down to the infirmary while the others worked on disconnecting the Galra crystal; Allura had shot down any idea of using it to start the infirmary that it might cause interference, and that they wouldn’t want to power the cryopod down to switch to a safer crystal once it had started its work. Lance managed a punch-drunk, barely audible “Awww, you do care!” while he was getting Lance’s arm over his shoulder for a carry, but passed back out again soon after. 

That was when he realized he was getting one more incredulous look, from Allura in the doorway.

Lance wasn’t exactly light, either, but he was at least similar height and build, and Paladin armor wasn’t nearly as heavy as some of the plate mail he’d messed with back on Earth. He was pretty sure it also had some mechanism built in to give some kind of augment or assist. It wasn’t as awkward as it could be.

He was worried about Shiro, but looking after Lance was more productive right now. He left, marching past Allura to get Lance to the cryobay. She was staring after him with a strange sort of mindblown incredulity that he couldn’t figure out. 

It would be a long time before he realized that most of it was the discovery that her new team of heroes were people she could throw one-handed that would have difficulty doing the same. None of them would be privy to the “THEY’RE SO FRAIL AND FRAGILE” conversation with the mice later, which would then be repeated with Corran, who would gently remind her that Altaean royalty were not a good measuring stick to gauge anybody else by. 

Lance was still breathing on the way down, even if it was shallow and faint enough to be worrying. “Sorry about that delay. I fell for their diversion pretty hard, but we brought him down together.” The hallways were still dark, his footsteps echoing in a way that accentuated how big the castle really was. “Not like there’s a lot we can do until Hunk and Corran get back…I know a little first aid, but I don’t think there’s much I can do for this.” 

As obnoxious and irritating as Lance could be, he was realizing that he much preferred even the most confrontational posturing over what he was dealing with now - limp and barely alive, with only luck and whatever god might exist continuing to maintain that. “You know I don’t hate you, right? I’m not sure what I did to piss you off so badly. I know I got into a lot of fights back at the Garrison and I’ve never really gotten along with anybody besides Shiro, but I remember the people that pissed me off better than that. I didn’t pay much attention to anyone else. I don’t even remember the people they had me in the simulator with really. I wanted to get into space, and I was mostly just tuning out the part where it’d mean spending months at a time in close quarters with other people.” He sighed; they were almost to the cryobay. “I mean, I knew about it, but whenever I thought about having to rely on other people like that, it was… a little terrifying.”

The castle was still mostly shut down. The door hung half-open, and he could only push it far enough to get into with one foot without jarring Lance. It was lucky that neither of them were very broad built. 

He got to the middle of the room, carefully letting Lance down near one of the nonfunctional pods. He started to look for the catches on the armor, only to get a warning rumble from Red in the back of his mind - something about the armor was probably helping keep him stable for the time being, and it wasn’t a good idea to try to get it off until they had a better alternative ready. He settled sitting down next to Lance, legs folded and hands draped in front of him.

“…Okay so it’s still a lot terrifying, but I guess the joke’s on me there, with us all in this together now. I didn’t really think the first real scare would be someone almost dying.” He paused, taking a careful, worried moment to make sure Lance was still breathing. “Look, I’m still not sure what to do with you or how the Hell I’m supposed to deal with you other than that you’re not that bad of a guy when you’re not posturing and sniping at me. Annoying as all fuck, yeah, but…” He folded up, pulling his knees up to his chest and wrapping his arms around them. “You’re not allowed to go leaving me like this before I’ve even figured out what to do with having a place in things with other people, alright? I know I’m not easy to deal with and nobody but Shiro’s been able to put up with me for very long before. Hate me all you want, just… not so much you’re willing to die to get away from me.” 

The room was silent and dark; a few minutes later Lance made a faint, pained noise, but it passed without any indication of consciousness. 

“Not too much longer. I hope. Just hang on a little longer, okay?” He reached over to rest a hand on Lance’s shoulder; he wasn’t sure how much it’d do, particularly with the armor. 

There was another small scrape as two of the mice peeked out of the innards of the terminal, apparently done checking it over; they ran over, each darting up one side of his arms to sit on his shoulder. They had to’ve been there the entire time.

The one he was looking at reached over to put a paw against his face, staring at him gravely, and then patted his face a couple times.

“…Thanks, guys.” The mouse squeaked with a serious nod. For a moment he wished he could understand them, then he realized they’d been there through the whole time he was babbling at Lance in a post-battle, still-hungover haze of worry, and he decided he preferred them not able to speak. “I’m okay. Really. I think everyone here had it worse than me today.”

The mouse narrowed red eyes at him, leaning in, nose twitching, then whirled around to curl up and settle grumpily on his shoulderplate. 

He settled into pensively waiting, trying not to think too hard about anything going on; it turned into a little bit of mentally leaning on Red, letting a large, warm rumble drown out everything else. 

Then he startled to his feet at the sound of running echoing down the hallway - most of it too metallic to be anyone unarmored, but not all of it. He had his bayard in hand and active, on guard in case there was a need for backup fast, but there was no sound of pursuit or sign of anything else when Pidge skidded into the room, Allura and Shiro close behind.

“Hunk and Corran are back and the new crystal should be hooked up any second now he’s still with us right?” It all came out in one breath, with a jerk of her head toward Lance.

He relaxed posture, letting the bayard’s blade dismiss with a worried glance down; Lance was still breathing. “Yeah. Still with us.” 

Allura helped with getting the armor off; she seemed to have an easier time getting the catches to respond, but he noticed that when he was trying to work it, he could feel Red paying intent attention, with Blue oddly noticeable just past his own lion. He suspected he wouldn’t have been able to do anything with it if Blue hadn’t been allowing it. Allura also helped with wrestling Lance’s lanky frame into the tube; Keith had been expected to be taking most of the weight, and ended up with the surprise that Allura not only did most of the lifting, but made it look effortless.

There was only so much fussing to be done, and he walked out after a while, announcing an intent to head back up to the command room to see if Hunk and Corran needed any help. He made it up a couple floors before he heard footsteps hurrying to catch up - armored and too small to be Shiro. 

Pidge stopped a few feet away, one of the other mice peeking over her head through her hair. 

She ran a hand through her hair. She made a couple furtive glances back, awkward and not making eye contact; the mouse jumped down to her shoulder and darted forearm to stand on hind legs, looking between them. 

“…Look, about earlier…. You were right.”

He blinked and stared at her blankly, needing a minute to parse; it was the second time in one day someone had been the opposite of angry at him for blowing up at them stupidly.

“I mean you were a bit of an asshole about it, but you weren’t…really wrong, either. We all kind of need each other out here, we’re _not_ the only ones suffering, and… I’m not sure how to even begin looking for my family by myself.” 

“…It worked out. That prepped pod and you being off everyone’s radar probably saved all our lives.” They probably would’ve been dead without it. 

She seemed caught off guard by it, looking back up at him sideways uncertainly. “Well, yeah, it did, but - if that bomb had gone off an hour later, I would’ve been gone and I don’t know when I’d have even known what’d happened to all of you.”

He sank leaning against the wall, his armor clinking against it; the mice didn’t seem disturbed at all, shifting effortlessly to compensate. The one Pidge was holding had curled up in her hand, peering through her fingers at him. “Look, I have enough to worry about right now; if you’re not going to ditch us, then that’s one less thing on the list.” He was tired, sore, had a hangover headache still lingering that was overlapping with headache, a little banged up, was worried about Lance, worried about Shiro, worried about the castle, worried about how soon other pursuit could catch up, worried about the Arusians, and running out of energy to keep adding to that list. 

She finally looked straight at him, although she still seemed lost. “…You’re sure? You’re not still mad?”

He gave her his level best look of utter exhaustion. “Pidge, if Shiro hadn’t been in that pod back on Earth, I’d probably still be just as much of an obsessive basket case as you’ve been. I’m the last person here who can judge you for considering throwing someone else under the bus for someone you care about.” 

Her posture slumped with a grouchy glare, voice thick with sarcasm. “Gee. Thanks.” The narrow glare continued for another couple beats, and the sarcasm flattened out into monotone horror. “…Oh god, you’re serious aren’t you.” 

He gave a one-armed shrug, not wanting to move the shoulder with the mouse that was curled up and probably less able to react fast. 

“…Right. Uh.” She shifted from one foot to another. “You two must’ve been pretty close, then.” There was a distracted thoughtful cast to the way she was studying him.

“He was all I had.” 

“You really don’t have any family to go back to.” Her tone had a tinge of concerned horror and pity that was a little grating - the sort of thing that came from someone too used to having something to think much about not having it. One of the mice on his shoulders turned to look over, ears swiveling around to focus on him.

“Nope. No parents, extended family gave up on me, never had a foster home work out for more than a couple months. I aged out of the system in the Garrison. Shiro just decided I needed someone to look out for me one day and never went away until Kerberos.” He acted flippant about it, even if there was an edge of a glare back, challenging her to try and carry that pity any further. 

Her face fell in a sort of sick, uncomfortable guilt; she closed her eyes, wrinkling her nose. “…You _were_ at the launch, in the Garrison uniform. …You’d wedged in to ask Dad if you could be assigned to their team when you graduated - I… think Shiro said something about how you’d probably be in command of a team of your own, but you seemed…desperate about it.”

“Yeah. Your father said he’d see what he could do.” And a part of him still wished he’d graduated in time to be on that mission, even if he knew it would’ve screwed everything up - someone had to be there when Shiro’s pod crashed, and someone had to do the scouting to narrow down where to look for the lion whether he knew what he was looking for at the time or not. 

She opened her eyes a hair, still lost in thought, then something struck her and she went awkward again. “…I should go see if they need any help with the repairs.” She hurried out, breaking into a run when she hit the hallway.

He turned to look after her, then settled back with his head against the pillar. “Man I’m glad you guys can’t talk”, he commented idly to the mice. Allura had been directing them, yes, but Red had been able to do something similar with him, and the vague ideas and concepts Red threw at him weren’t exactly clear enough to put words without work most of the time. 

A few things started falling into place, bits of things he knew from normal means fitting into the vague impression of an identity he’d gotten from the relay. He’d seen the photo and caught the image when they were doing practice exercises again; he’d taken for granted that the person in glasses in the image was Pidge. As bad as he was at people, he knew better than to do something dumb like ask questions about presenting male, and if anything, after some of the backwards idiots he’d dealt with in Texas, he probably would’ve growled at anyone getting catty about any identity issues or questioning her having a girlfriend whether she was female passing for male for some reason or male trying to sort out their own head. 

Except they’d all probably misjudged which one was Pidge, the vessel in the background was familiar and _was_ the ship from the Kerberos mission, he sort of remembered someone shorter in a sun dress around Commander Holt, Hunk had probably handed Pidge a lampshade to hide behind with the comment about having a girlfriend, and the girl in the picture with short hair and glasses would look exactly like Pidge and a lot like her brother. (His estimate of Iverson’s intelligence dropped, if the commander really had never suspected that a recruit who looked that much like a shorter version of Matt showing up a couple weeks after his little sister had been thrown out might not be who they said they were.)

It cast his own questions about his own identity in a new and terrifying light, and he was all the more resolved to not say a goddamn word and pray Pidge either hadn’t noticed anything about being probably either part alien or altered, or pray that if she had, she wanted to keep the truce solid as much as he did. Red seemed to be thinking over something, but wasn’t sharing.

The lion was well aware of how much denial was coloring his idea of what to worry about leaking on the relay.

****************************

He meant to get some rest after that, failed, found that there wasn’t a lot to do helping with repairs, tried anyway to help with moving debris and what he could do of maintenance. There was a lot of carrying broken pieces out of the way, helping Shiro move the Galra crystal down to the hangar where Pidge had found something to keep it in that was hypothetically safe, and running to different parts of the castle to get tools and parts from storage rooms, interspersed with hovering and trying not to pace while Shiro mostly spent down minutes leaning against a wall nodding off. 

He apparently passed out at some point; he woke up in a corner of the command deck with a blanket over him, with the same mouse that had fussed at him curled up a foot from his face as if keeping watch.

As soon as he sat up, the mouse darted off. The command deck was pretty well cleaned up and beginning to look normal again, although Hunk was asleep using a thin Altaean toolbox as a pillow on the other side of the room, and he spotted Shiro, curled up propped against a wall asleep a few feet away. The other two had been ambushed with blankets as well at some point, although Hunk at least looked like he’d meant to fall asleep there.

Allura was awake; either Altaeans didn’t need much sleep, or she’d done the smart thing and actually caught a nap at some point. He suspected the latter. Her attention was on a near wall of light panels in front of her, half of which had diagrams of the castle that were probably diagnostics.

The mouse ran up her skirt to curl up on her shoulder. She didn’t even react, focused on what she was doing; there were a good three or four minutes before she found a breaking point to look over. “Oh good, you’re awake.” She dismissed half of the panels with a hand gesture, reaching around the console for something, then walked over to hold down what was probably some kind of larger thermos. He took it, fumbling for a minute to figure out how it worked, but at least had guessed right that it was water. She stayed knelt down next to him.

“You fell asleep when there was a lull. Shiro didn’t manage much longer. I moved the two of you out of the way while Hunk was buried in the walls working, and Corran found spare blankets in a more intact storage room. Hunk decided to take a nap a little while ago.”

The headache had only gotten worse, although water was helping. He’d probably gotten through half of it before he stopped to breathe. “How is everything?” He motioned at the few screens that were still up.

Her mood dimmed, looking over her shoulder pensively. “For the most part, it isn’t as bad as I’d feared. They had to make some repairs themselves in their attempt to hijack it.” Something cold, sharp, and bitter crossed her face. “Are you alright? Your armor should have been adequate protection, but the Galra have changed their methods in our absence, and I don’t like the feel of that crystal.”

Enough had gone on that helping Shiro move it down to the hangars had almost blurred in among all of the rest of the debris hauling he’d been doing. It hadn’t been pleasant to handle at all, and now he almost wished he hadn’t had the reminder of the skin-crawling charge it had sent up his arms when he touched it. “I’m fine. It wasn’t that bad.”

She didn’t seem to entirely believe him, but after a couple beats, chose to move on. “Let us know if there’s anything odd? If it does turn out to have any effect, it would be easier to treat the sooner it’s caught.” 

He nodded. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

Allura smiled, standing back up. “At this point, we’re relying on some of the automated systems as much as our own repairs; it’s mostly a matter of waiting.” 

He stood up, stretching and trying to shake off bits of stiffness from sleeping awkwardly after that rough of a day. “Have we heard from the Arusians?”

She paused, and the switch in trains of thought was almost visible. “…Not yet today.” She tapped something else on one of the light screens, bringing up a large one that covered the back wall with a view of the outside, and scrolled it around to where the village could be seen. There was only lingering bits of clear smoke; it was a mess, with many of the buildings smashed and burned, but the tiny aliens were visible bustling around doing repairs.

Allura flagged, shoulders slumping, and lowered her head. “We need to leave. They’re in more and more danger the longer we linger.” 

He nodded, suddenly a little worried about Earth. “At least once we’re off-planet, if they get any other bright ideas like this, they’d have to find a way to contact us for it to be any use to them.” He didn’t have anybody on Earth to worry about, but he didn’t know about Hunk, Pidge probably had SOMETHING left behind, and Lance had a small village of a family; if the Galra did get it in their heads to take hostages for bait, they’d have plenty of targets. 

“At least. Hopefully Sendak didn't know to share that the Arusians can call for us; the villagers have suffered enough at their hands.” She shook her head, scowling. “And compared to many of the distress beacons the castle logged over the centuries, they were barely touched. The Galra have only grown steadily worse since Altaea was destroyed.” 

Keith walked over to stand just behind her, watching the screen distantly. “We can’t be the only ones fighting. There can’t be any species that’d just all decide to stay down.” 

“We may have potential allies out there, but it seems that Zarkon has been quite thorough in eradicating any resistance that does enough to draw attention. There are ten thousand years of beacons that light, then go out, word of entire worlds turned to slave labor camps and prisoners used for blood sports having become an entrenched tradition, all spread across the Empire and treated by the Galra as their due.” She was glaring at the screen in bitter disgust; he had a short, worried glance sideways at Shiro, still asleep against the wall. “When I was younger I never would have dreamed a race could have grown so savagely corrupt.”

He frowned, looking back up at the screen. “We’ve had nations like this on Earth…the governments usually spread out claiming others, then collapse after a while.” But then, they also were led by mortals that aged and died. “If we could just find out how Zarkon’s managed to live this long…”

Allura took a deep breath and let it out slowly, closing her eyes and leaning her hands against the console in front of her. “We could chase our thoughts in circles on this for days and get no-where with what we know now. The universe has become a horror show, and there’s little to do but start trying to clean it up and keep at it until this nightmare is over.” 

He nodded, folding his arms. He was a little glad the star map wasn’t up with the markers of distress beacons and Galra-owned territory; it was a little more manageable to think about what they had to do without seeing the immense sprawl. The memory of it was interrupted by flames and a near-growl rumble; Red had waited ten thousand years, and had ten thousand years worth of pent up anger and frustration at everything going wrong to get out, even if it took carving the Empire apart piece by piece. 

_Right there with you, buddy._

He didn’t realize he’d gone dazed or mouthed his response to the lion until he started out of the half-daze with Allura watching him sidelong. 

“We’ll get there, sooner or later.” He put a hand on her shoulder, and then a moment later as more of the flames flooding through his mind settled, picked up and pulled his hand back, suddenly aware again that he knew her even less than any of the other pilots and without the benefit of getting to overhear the inside of her head sometimes. Red was bemused at his internal backpedal away, and something Corran had said came back to mind - that Alfor had tied the lions to her as a key. 

So he couldn’t pick up on her, but Red might be able to.

She was giving him an odd, faint smile that had a calculating tilt to it he didn’t really like. The mouse raised its head and gave a short, derisive sounding squeak.

“Yes, it does seem so, but I think it will all work out given time.”

It was definitely directed to the mouse. 

“…You can understand them? Like - words understand them, not just images and ideas?”

The smile spread through predatory to bright, cheerful, sunny, and the most terrifying thing he’d ever seen. “They’re surprisingly good conversationalists, _excellent_ listeners, and _very_ observant.”

She could talk to the mice. The mice could talk to her, and not the way Red talked to him. The mice that’d been in the room listening the whole time he was talking at an unconscious Lance, and for at least one of his conversations with Pidge, and gods only knew what else. 

The color drained out of his face and he could feel Red laughing soundlessly in his head.

“I should go see if the Arusians need any help.”

He turned on one heel and marched fast out the door, Allura still smiling and turning to watch him leave. If anyone ever asked about him breaking into a run after he’d gotten down the elevator to the ground floor, it was being in a hurry and worried about the small aliens, and absolutely not fleeing in terror from the princess.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For what it's worth, Keith's recovery time on the alcohol is based on experience, and I couldn't resist tossing in a nod to Lance calling him "samurai" in the comics, either. His rant about Texas is partly based on experience of a good friend, and partly probably overlaps with Keith as a tiny being bad at fitting in.


	3. Somewhere weakness is our strength

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith and Shiro spend some time helping out with the Arusians, and end up with Allura dealing with a minor diplomatic incident; Hunk has a friendship bat and is not afraid to use it, and Keith finds a way to avoid the mice eavesdropping. Shiro's still recovering from Sendak and being bad at sitting still and resting.

Red met him just outside the castle, and he could still feel the soundless laughter, although there was a nudging reminder just how far of a walk it was to the Arusian village on foot. 

The laughing hadn’t stopped by the time Red stopped outside the village, and he was starting to sulk. 

The Arusians, at least, were happy to see him, a small throng breaking off to gather by the lion when he stepped out. He realized as Red raised its head that he had not thought anything through, and had no idea how to address gatherings of aliens. 

“Lion warrior! You honor us with your presence.” The Arusian that stepped forward walked with a staff that had a number of claws and bone bits hanging from it; the others stepped out of the way to allow them to pass. “Has your enemy been vanquished?”

He nodded. “Yeah. It’s over for now.” And in all the chaos, they hadn’t been given much for an explanation. Allura had given them a basic explanation of the war with Zarkon when they visited the village before, at least. He took a moment to gather himself and try to project to the crowd. “They used some form of trickery to destroy the castle’s power source, then attacked your village to draw us out. While the Princess and I ran here, they slipped in and used their own power source to take control. We managed to regain the castle, destroy their forces, and take their leader prisoner.” A relieved murmur went through the gathered crowd. “We’ll be leaving as soon as the castle is repaired, to draw them away from your people. I came to help where I could until then.”

The elder gave a despairing look back at the burned-out village. “Your aid is greatly appreciated; there is much to do.”

He was put to work quickly, mostly using his height to help with steadying and assembling parts of the frames for the houses. He noticed the steady trickle of Arusians bringing in bowls of light clay, which was getting mixed with water and worked into a building material for the walls. 

A few questions about that visible bottleneck turned into a couple of trips with Red, ferrying a small gang of utterly fascinated small aliens and a large number of the big carrying pots back and forth from the lake coast they were gathering from. 

They were unloading the last set they had jars and pots prepared for when the Black Lion landed nearby. 

He leaned against Red’s jaw, trying to look nonchalant and suddenly very self-conscious about letting aliens into the lion right after they’d just almost lost the castle to a security breach. 

He wasn’t aware how much his nonchalance had failed and was coming out as something closer to a dog in the middle of a shredded room.

Black lowered its head so that Shiro could step out; Shiro paused, taking in the scene of Red, the Arusians, and Keith.

And smiled, beaming proudly.

He’d been bracing for having done something wrong, and between that and the last few days, it was enough to feel like a weight had been lifted; he hadn’t seen Shiro genuinely happy, without any tired qualifiers or creeping other worries, very often at all since before Kerberos. Red leaned in mentally, tugging on the interconnections, making sure he did catch the very real relief and pride, enough memory from before coming through for Shiro to be having a moment of appreciating how much Keith had already grown since the Garrison. 

Red was purring in his head, and he was hitting an awkward moment of not being sure what to do with any of it. He waved at Shiro, smiling.

Red did, at least, tone down dragging his attention off of his surroundings and the volume of the other input. Shiro walked over, stopping nearby, helmet held under one arm. 

“I heard about how bad things were out here, and there’s not much for me to do in the castle, so I thought I’d come help out.” He was cleaned up some, but still had visible scrapes and a split lip; Keith was unsure if he wanted to know how badly Shiro was still beat up under the armor. “I see you’ve gotten a head start on us all.”

“Yeah; the lake they get the clay for their walls from is a pretty big walk, so Red and I did a few ferry runs. I think I’m going to be holding up house frames again pretty soon, though.” He ducked back around into Red’s jaws, grabbing another of the jars to haul out. Shiro tagged after, finding one of the heavier ones to carry into the village, following Keith. 

There was a part of the town square with jars set out neatly covering the area; they made a few trips with the Arusians until all of what had been gathered was collected in the town square. A couple of the Arusians got the last few, and Red lifted its head to go back to rest, leaving the two paladins on the ground below, turning back to go see what else the village needed.

The King waved to them from across the village, but any attempt at breaking away to meet them kept getting interrupted by villages running up with various questions and emergencies; the celebration had meant there hadn’t been very many in the village when it was attacked, but there had been enough that the couple more intact buildings were taken up by injured and a few of the Arusians acting as medics. Shiro waved back, and the King finally turned to the elder Keith had seen earlier, pointing their direction.

The elder had an easier time breaking away, meeting them at the edge of the square, skirting around two large scars burned into the ground - scars that made Keith wince as he realized they were a little too long and the wrong pattern for the explosives Sendak had been using, but were placed and spaced about right for where Voltron’s wings would have been when the monster threw them into the village. Seen from the ground, they’d only barely managed to steer the machine away from hitting anything; one of the scars stopped a yard or so away from a now-burned house. 

He wasn’t sure what to make of the beginnings of colored tiles along the insides of the scars. 

“Your help is greatly appreciated, Lion Warriors.” The elder held his staff straight in front of him and bowed. Keith stopped a little behind Shiro and to one side; he was much happier letting Shiro handle the diplomacy part. 

“It’s the least we can do; after all, they only targeted you because of us.” Shiro returned the bow, trying to follow the hand movements that had accompanied it with some of the other Arusians. “I only wish that we could do more to properly make up for this without drawing more of their attention to you.”

“Your princess told us of your war. You do not cause the enemy’s evil; your part is the lives you save that would have been lost otherwise.” The elder gave a tired, dismissive gesture, looking up at Shiro pointedly. Keith echoed the pointed look from outside Shiro’s line of sight, and nudged Red with a request to make sure he couldn’t ignore it and focusing on the words ‘ _Don’t apologize for Zarkon_ ’ as loud as he mentally could.

“I’ll…try to remember that.” Shiro glanced back at Keith, perplexed, then turned his attention back to the elder. “What else do you need?”

That turned quickly into the elder rattling off a list of some of the places their relative height and strength would be most useful, then pointing Keith back to the reconstruction efforts, studying the battered and scuffed state of Shiro’s armor and what was visible of lingering injury, and dragging Shiro to the square to help stir and tend a large vat where the clay was getting mixed. 

The internal frames the clay was built around were made of thin, flexible wood and bones from what he guessed were some sort of very large fish out of the lake. The top of the roofs would normally be at Keith’s eye level, which meant that he could stand inside a ruined building and pull the ribs of the structure together to tether and glue at the top without needing to climb or get ladders, filling the spaces between the curved struts with fish-ribs. There’d often be one or more of the Arusians climbing up the side struts to work on another side of it once the top was secured. 

And that was how he ended up nose to nose with Klaixap unexpectedly. The little alien was diligent and driven at working on rebuilding, but had more than enough energy to manage to be chatty on top of it, flipping between addressing him as “Paladin” and “Lion Warrior”, peering around parts of framework with questions.

After a handful of short answers, he finally had to correct something, securing the wooden struts together on another house. “We’re not from the same world as the Princess or the lions.” 

“Really?” Klaixap had gone straight over the top of the framework and stopped upside down, feet wrapped around the struts close to where Keith had just attached them, one of the fish-ribs in hand. 

“Really. Her people were killed about ten thousand cycles ago, and she was in an enchanted sleep for all that time.” He was staying mostly still, waiting for the cement mixture that would hold the framework together at the top to dry enough to be sturdy. “We were behind your people when they hid one of the lions on my homeworld; we were still figuring out how to grow crops. We only just started seriously sending out ships that could get off of our planet. The lion brought us here so we could gather the others.” 

Klaixap made a couple thoughtful noises around the tie he had transferred to his mouth while he got one of the fishbones attached, then spit it into his hand. “Then that means we will be like your people one day?” 

He nodded. “I don’t know if either of us will still be around by then, but if we can beat Zarkon out of this area of space, maybe we can teach you.” 

Klaixap grinned; Keith was pretty sure he’d just given a heart attack to one of the ethics professors back at the Garrison who was fond of Prime Directive style avoidance of interference in development of another race, but at this point, that ship had long since sailed. Besides, under the circumstances, giving people like the Arusians some friendly backup that would teach them to keep up on their own was probably the better option to leaving them sitting ducks for someone like the Galra to enslave them. The conversation meandered after that, Klaixap an endless font of questions about Keith’s sword training, what Earth was like, and what the space training was like; it was easy to just zone out focusing on the work and run through answers without thinking.

After a few hours that involved covering a decent chunk of the village, they stopped to rest; after finding a couple gourds of water and some food, Klaixap led through the village back toward the square, motioning at Keith to keep low and be quiet. The end destination was a half-standing building that had apparently been a storehouse; the wall was one of the closest to the square, enough to hear conversation at the ring of small stone benches where Shiro and the elder were working. 

“Tell no one Klaixap showed you this”, the tiny alien whispered, holding a hand over his mouth with a stifled grin. 

Keith smiled pointily, catching the implication - he’d had a few stories of sneaking around the Garrison to eavesdrop, and apparently wasn’t the only one prone to it.

“-just grown? They were all just finishing their training, or would have if things hadn’t happened, and I think the Princess is the equivalent to our age range herself. I’m not even that much older than them, although it’s easy to forget that part.” 

At least Shiro was apparently talking to the Elder. “No wonder Klaixap and some of the other young adults grew attached so quickly; you are all around their age, relatively.” 

Klaixap looked up at him as if this were a new revelation; he shrugged, curling around what was apparently some kind of roasted-vegetable filled starchy bread. Klaixap shifted to sit a little closer with his. 

“Allura insists we were chosen, that it was some kind of fate or destiny, but… the only one who was really called that we know of is Keith, the rest of us just kind of blundered into the wrong place at the right time. They said the previous Paladins were already great heroes when the Lions chose them, and that they fought and lived as one. I kinda get the feeling we just happened to be what they could grab at the time.”

He gave the wall behind him a dim look; he could almost hear Shiro’s unspoken internal correction of placing himself at the top of the ‘what happened to be in reach at the time’ list. He also needed to do something nice for the Elder; he was pretty sure Shiro would avoid talking like this to any of them.

“Isn’t that what fate is?” There was an awkward questioning noise from Shiro. “You were there. You were capable. You moved to act, and you were accepted.” 

“I…think we have different definitions of fate.” 

The elder made a noncommittal noise. “So tell me about your comrades.” 

“I…only just met most of them. They were all training to travel the stars, the same as I had. Hunk had trained to maintain and improve on the machines and ships; he cooks and mentioned studying what living things could be like on oher worlds to learn how to forage. He hadn’t really wanted to go into combat, but he tries to look out for everyone. Pidge can make the power that runs the machines do just about anything; he’s clever, quick, and stubborn. His family was taken by Zarkon on an exploration mission, and he’s trying to find them. Lance is a pilot with good aim, but I think he’s still figuring out what to do with himself. He acts like he just wants to goof off, but he’ll throw himself in the line of fire to help others in a heartbeat - that’s how he got injured.” Shiro had a sober pause, and Keith stopped eating, staring down at his food; it would be hard not to worry until Lance was out of the infirmary. “Keith’s the only one I knew before any of this.” 

There was a pause and the sound of the elder’s staff tapping against metal - either Shiro’s hand or armor; Klaixap looked up at him, mouth full of food, and looked off at the busted other wall, trying to feign not paying attention. Keith was pretty sure it was a lie. 

“He’s brave and loyal, very protective of anybody he cares about, but he’s had a rough life and he has a hard time warming up to people. I think he’s had more people than he realizes, he was just so focused on goals or what he was doing at the time that he tuned them out. He spends a lot of time being angry over things that aren’t right, and I’m not sure he’s figured out yet how to do anything else.” Shiro laughed. “Hunk and Lance seem like they’ve been friends for a while, and Pidge trained with them, so it’s mostly me catching up and them and Keith trying to figure each other out right now.” 

The Elder made a thoughtful, approving noise. “You’ll be fine.” Then - “Is there a reason you don’t speak of yourself?”

Shiro gave a weak, broken, laugh. “I was with Pidge’s family. Zarkon’s people did something to me; I don’t remember a lot.”

The elder made an odd sort of whuff noise that didn’t sound impressed. It didn’t cover other sounds, and Keith realized a moment too late he’d made a reflexive noise of frustration. Klaixap flattened down and he did the best he could to do the same, hoping it would go unnoticed or get dismissed as ambient noise.

Then he heard a faint, familiar artificial high-pitched whine. He set the food and gourd down and stood up slowly, hands raised.

Shiro was standing, the arm was glowing and active, and he was glaring focused on the wall they’d been hiding behind. The glow flickered off as the hand deactivated, the ready glare turning into exasperation. “I thought you said you weren’t going to sneak up on me.”

“I wasn’t. I was just getting lunch.” He lowered his hands as if putting them in his pockets, using one hand behind the wall to motion at Klaixap to clear out. He’d be in less trouble than the small alien.

Shiro stared at him, irritation mixed with disappointment mixed with just long-suffering acceptance. He bent down to get his food and the gourd; Klaixap was slipping out the back. He held the roll and the gourd up over the wall, walking around it as if nothing had happened.

Shiro rolled his eyes. The elder leaned on his staff, and Keith was pretty sure there was quiet amusement.

“I wasn’t trying to get your attention.” 

Shiro gave him a sharp stare, holding up the mechanical hand at ready.

“I’ll be careful.” 

The elder had definitely caught more of the exchange than Shiro wanted even if he was avoiding saying anything out loud, and figured out to doubt the “remembering nothing” assertion, but wasn’t calling him on it. Keith sat down on Shiro’s other side - the good one - to finish the rest of his lunch. The Elder stood, leaving to go direct another part of the rebuilding.

“Sorry about that. Old habits.” He’d spent plenty of time trying to avoid unwanted attention at the Garrison, and before Kerberos, Shiro had just taken for granted that he’d appear out of nowhere. It made an easy dodge to avoid getting Klaixap in trouble for it. 

“I know. I wish it weren’t a problem now.” Shiro sighed, the grumpy energy that he’d started channeling into the clay mixture already wilting. “I am glad it was you and not some straggler of Sendak’s.”

“I think he took all he had into the Castle. He was counting on the Castle’s shields and being able to get it offworld.”

Shiro had a pensive, uncomfortable pause, but nodded. “It’s hard not to be watching every shadow after a close call like that.”

A couple of Arusians came by with empty lacquered baskets, collecting clay out of the vat; Shiro nodded to them with a tired smile, and they bowed their heads before darting off to their work. Shiro did look like he was still a mess. Keith couldn’t really talk about throwing himself into physical labor as a distraction from worrying, not when it was part of why he was so intent on finding something to do whenever he was awake, but he also hadn’t taken the beating Shiro had.

“You’ll actually get some rest when we’re ready to launch, right?”

“I’ll try.” 

He took another bite of the odd roll, and had another thought, glaring sideways at Shiro. “When did you last eat?”

Shiro paused, a few long beats of blank silence; Keith narrowed his eyes.

“I’ll go get something in a minute, okay?”

“Shiro. You need to eat, too.”

“Yes, mom.” Shiro rolled his eyes, ignoring the glower he earned for it. The moment was interrupted not long after by one of the Arusians running in close, holding up a lidded ceramic bowl of some kind at Shiro.

Shiro took it, confused; the Arusian pointed back at where the harried-looking King was giving directions, the elder next to him staring at Shiro with what was somehow a much more effective version of a warning glare than Keith’s, despite being barely three feet tall. He lifted the lid off; it was full of some kind of soup.

Keith turned to face away, stifling a vicious little victorious laugh. Shiro shrank down on the short bench, drinking out of the bowl with an occasional nervous glance to check if the elder was still watching.

The elder couldn’t really keep focus on Shiro either, but Keith was right there, and made sure to elbow Shiro if it looked like he was going to try to sneak the bowl somewhere else before he’d at least gotten something into him. He wished Shiro forgetting to eat or being prone to getting food, setting it down, and forgetting about it was a new development, but it was one he remembered going back as far as they’d known each other. 

Once Shiro was actually going back to work on the vat, heshifted a little closer, scanning the area to make sure none of the Arusians were close by, and kept his voice down. “Klaixap showed me that hiding spot. I didn’t want to get him in trouble for it. He snuck out the back.”

Shiro paused, then something broke and he started laughing, leaning forward to rest his head against the pole in his hands. 

“We really were taking a break to eat?” 

Shiro managed to catch his breath, but was still leaning. “If I’d known the way to get you out of your shell was to drag you halfway across the universe…” 

“Hey, I never got along with humans. These are aliens.” He raised his open hands, running with the joke. “That’s part of why I wanted off Earth.”

“You know there’s not that many people who’d want to skip the planet to get away from their own kind.”

His smile twitched with an awkward half-wilt. Shiro paused in stirring the mix, another flicker of concern and ‘what did I say wrong’ crossing his face. 

“…It’s okay. I just need to talk to you later. In private.”

Shiro nodded. “It’s still good to see you actually enjoying yourself around people. Human or not.”

“The ‘Lion Warrior’ thing is a little awkward, but it really isn’t so bad out here.” When they weren’t getting shot at, at least. 

A few more of the Arusians came by to collect the clay mixture for rebuilding. It was noisy and things were a mess, but there was a continual background chatter from the alien villagers, and a frazzled minder chasing a couple smaller Arusian children who were intent on using the scars Voltron’s wings had dug out of the ground as a slide. The minder flopped next to one of the raised ridges, apparently resigning to just tiredly keeping the kids there; Shiro slowed tending the vat, watching with a quiet smile. “You know, when I got into space exploration, this is more the kind of alien contact I’d been hoping for.” 

Keith laughed. “I don’t think I was ever optimistic enough to think it’d be what we’d get, but…” He shrugged. “Even with my own reasons, part of me always hoped you’d be more right.”

“You might’ve turned out more right in the end, but … we’re still here, and so are they.” Shiro shook his head absently and went back to stirring.

After a while, he went back to helping around the village; Klaixap materialized at some point, tugging him off to go gather deadwood for fires. The sun was starting to go down, and the light forest around the hills was mostly peaceful, with sing-song calls of alien wildlife. He might’ve been more used to desert scrub, but it wasn’t a bad area at all. It was almost relaxing. 

Or at least, it was until he realized there was movement in the brush that was tracking him, keeping just enough distance to not be right on top of him. 

He bent to rifle under a bush, listening and waiting; whatever it was came closer, making effort to avoid shifting the vegetation.

He gauged until it was close enough, tapped the trigger to close the faceplate on the armor, and dove.

Whatever he caught was smaller than him, and he didn’t get a good look until he stood up to find an Arusian, a little darker in coloration than the villagers and wearing different patterns, making a valiant effort at either biting through his vambrace or stabbing through his chestplate with a bone knife. Neither effort was doing much. He shifted to hold the squirming alien at arm’s length, growing more and more weary of whatever was going on.

“Hey.”

A rock clanged off his helmet with enough force to be noticeable, then there was another commotion and yelling as Klaixap tackled another foreign Arusian out of the tree behind him; they hit the ground rolling. He could hear commotion from the direction of the village.

He fixed a glare at the one in his hands, who had stopped struggling and was snarling at him. “What the Hell’s going on here?”

The Arusian brought their bone blade down on his gauntlet. It clanged off, part of the blade chipped. Klaixap managed to get the other one pinned, and then had to duck another sling-stone before a third one charged out of the brush to stop short of him with a spear. Klaixap couldn’t let the one he had pinned up without getting attacked from that way, and he basically had a hostage in his hands stopping the one with a spear from going any further.

Of course, Klaixap had introduced himself as a warrior, and that meant there was some reason to _have_ warriors. 

Shiro and the band of hastily armed Arusians that followed him were making no effort at stealth, although he was disturbing the foliage a great deal more; the arm was on and active, violet light bright and getting the fast attention of the three foreign Arusians. 

He stopped, scanning the clearing and Keith’s tired exasperation, and stood straighter, arm dropped to half ready and looking about ready for a drink. The more familiar Arusians fanned out around the clearing, ringing it.

“Okay, let’s try this again.” Keith glared at the one in his hands. “What are you _doing_?” 

“We come from Daixni village! We come to investigate the village of the Lion-worshippers, whose rituals have called down angry gods!” The Arusian pointed their sword at Keith’s faceplate accusingly. 

Shiro groaned. “We’re not _gods_.” 

All three of the foreign Arusians stared at him in disbelief. 

“We’re people, like you. We’re from another world. The lions _are_ ours, but they’re not gods either.” 

Keith was pretty sure the last part was debatable, but this wasn’t the time for that. 

“Warriors of Daixni raid our village often, stealing our stores and our livestock!” Klaixap sounded angry, and Keith realized this probably explained some of the scars the little alien had. 

“We are scouts, here to learn why _you_ attack us with metal from the heavens!” The Arusian ineffectually waved a sword in his face again. 

Which was probably one of the pieces of Sendak’s ship they’d used for target practice. 

“We did no such thing! The metal from the heavens was the work of foul invaders, driven off by the Lion Warriors!” Klaixap was gesturing with his sword at the one Keith was holding, no longer seeming to care about the one that had him at spearpoint.

It descended quickly into high-volume bickering with interjections from other Arusians on both sides, all talking over each other badly enough that it was hard to make anything out; Shiro growled, burying his face in his good hand.

Keith glanced around the clearing; it was just him, Shiro, and the Arusians. "Alright, that's enough!", he snapped, but he was outnumbered enough for it to be drowned out.  
He took a couple deep breaths, trying to focus on relaxing his chest until he could feel more of the air coming in, then took a deeper breath.

“ALL OF YOU QUIET!” Besides the volume, there was a rattling rumble to it, a near-roar tone. When he’d been young it’d come and gone inconsistently, a quieter rumbling undertone at speaking volume; it’d seeped in just often enough to be something his supposed childhood peers had latched onto as a target, and he’d learned to suppress it young enough that it took effort to not hide it. 

It worked to get the Arusians quiet, although Shiro had frozen in place, the hand back active on high. 

He took a couple more careful breaths until his voice went back to normal - or at least, what he’d trained as normal most of his life. “We’re not here to fight anyone’s wars for them, we’re here to drive off our _own_ enemy, who’d roast all of you on a spit or throw you around as slaves if they got here!” 

He looked over to Shiro, who still hadn’t moved; one of the friendly Arusians nudged his leg, and he started, shaking his head as if shaking something off. “I. Yes. Look, let’s find someplace that isn’t the middle of the woods - ”

There was a light in the dim evening sky; the Yellow Lion was easy to spot, landing somewhere near the other two.

“Let’s go to the lions and sort this out. No killing anyone on _either_ side.” Shiro gave Klaixap and the spear-wielder the brunt of the pointed look; they narrowed their eyes at each other, but lowered their weapons, and Klaixap got off the one he’d pinned. 

Shiro led the procession that wound back to the lions; the prosthetic was deactivated, although there was an occasional irritable twitch of the fingers. Keith carried the one he’d caught under an arm, and that one seemed to have resigned to going limp and sulking; the other two followed close behind him, with the village warriors walking ahead and behind, Klaixap to his right. 

When they reached the lions, they found the King, watching the entire procession coming with Hunk and Allura. 

“We ran into a scouting party from a rival village”, Shiro explained succinctly, still frazzled. “They thought the lion gods were being summoned to destroy them.”

Allura nodded slowly, mouthing an ‘oh’. Sure enough, the three foreign Arusians were giving the lions suspicious stares, the two that were on foot using Keith as a barrier between them and the lions. “Well, then. Perhaps I can assist in clearing up misconceptions and maybe opening negotiations?” She gave the King a pointed glance; he shifted uncomfortably, giving the three scouts a wary look, but nodded. 

Keith glared at the Arusian he was carrying; the alien glared back. “I’m going to put you down now. You listen to the princess and don’t try anything, or else.” He set the alien down carefully; while they made a show of being very offended about straightening their clothes and gear, they folded their arms and stood, not starting a fight. 

Allura ended up with the brunt of the mediation duty. Shiro took a canteen of water and was tiredly making efforts to calm tempers and talk people down. Keith mostly just loomed and bristled in warning at any of the Arusians that seemed like they were about to start a fight. Hunk actually took over a few times, proving to have a talent for calm explanations and deflecting or ignoring provocation. Apparently there were two other villages that also had traditionally worshipped the “Lion Goddess” that were a little further away in other directions, and then the one the scouts were from and a few others that worshipped land spirits and saw the “Lion Goddess” as an intruder; compounding that, the area the Daixni lived in were rockier hills with more mineral and precious stone access, but less good arable land. By the time it had come to some sort of settlement, the sun was down, the moon was rising, and Allura had picked up a tiny dangerous twitch whenever the words “Lion Goddess” were said. 

It wasn’t anything that would be solved in one night’s time, and there was a little bit of hyperbole encouraging them to learn to cooperate to look out for each other in case the Galra came calling again. The scouts at least left with a message from the King requesting a peaceful parley to arrange a treaty, and the three that were brokering had managed, as roughly neutral parties, to offer a few ideas for organizing trade of resources to give the other village less reason to raid. Keith had his doubts about how well it would work, but it would mostly hinge on how the other village took hearing that the Lion Goddess was not a divine being and was leaving; the religious conflict would be harder to resolve than the resource one. 

They returned to the castle, mostly gathering in the control room, besides Corran who was either sleeping or monitoring the repairs to the engines. Shiro checked in long enough to announce that trying to sleep was probably a good idea. Pidge was asleep at one of the terminals, dead to the world with two of the mice curled up on her. Allura sank into one of the terminal seats, arms draped over the sides and head back on it with a groan. “How did father and his people make this look so _simple_ …”

“After a few hours between Keith and Lance, it wasn’t so bad.” Hunk made the joke lightly, but Keith caught the glance his way, and ducked his head to look away. It did get a short, cut-off snort of a laugh from Allura. 

“They have no idea how lucky they are - that little petty squabbles over who has more of what and who believes what are the worst they have to fight over.” 

“I dunno…I think Sendak gave some of them an idea.” Keith found his way to another of the terminals behind Allura, dropping his helmet beside it and draping over it with his head on one of the armrests. 

“It didn’t really seem like any of them wanted to fight. Both sides were just scared of each other and didn’t want to admit it, so they’ve been trying to scare each other off and taking things too far. And they’re both jealous of things the other one has they don’t. Kind of like some other people I know.” 

He felt the pointed look from Hunk, and lazily raised one hand to flip Hunk off, with a barely audible growl of ‘I am not jealous’.

Hunk continued as if it hadn’t happened. “Anyway, as long as they’re actually talking to each other, it should work out sooner or later. And Keith has a point, I think Sendak gave Your Loyal Worshipers a pretty good scare and a little perspective.” 

“Please don’t remind me about that goddess nonsense. The sooner I can forget it ever occurred, the better.” 

“Don’t worry. I won’t tell Lance it came up again.” Hunk sighed. “’I’ll be your loyal worshiper any time, princess’.” It was a remarkably good imitation of Lance, good enough to get Allura draping an arm over her face. “…Man, I never thought I’d miss that.”

Keith left that part alone, but it was almost creepy how _not_ hearing Lance’s awful attempts at pick-up lines felt unnatural in the castle. “You said it’d take around a day… so it shouldn’t be that much longer, right?” 

“Mmm. Probably a little after daybreak tomorrow. We have time to rest, with the castle’s security back online solidly.”

“I think I might go check on him - make sure everything’s working okay down there after everything blew up.” Hunk levered up standing, but didn’t head for the door; he stopped next to Pidge, nudging her shoulder gently with one hand. “Hey. Pidge. You awake enough to check on Lance?”

Pidge shifted slightly, with a mumble about coffee, no sugar. Hunk found one of the blankets folded out of the way, and draped it over Pidge, carefully minding the two mice. 

A minute after the door closed behind Hunk, Keith kicked back up standing, stretched, and headed for the door. Allura sat up, turning to lean on the chair. “Keith -”

He stopped, looking back over his shoulder. 

“You don’t have to be alone anymore. We’re all here for you.” 

“…Yeah. I guess so.” He gave a faint, wry smile and a stiff shrug before walking out; he wished it were really that easy.

The way down to the infirmary was quiet, but at least it was a normal quiet, complete with the white noise hum of the Castle. He could hear Hunk a little before he reached the door, and stopped outside it, leaning on the door.

“-miss much, really. Well, I guess you missed most of the fight, besides saving Pidge from Sendak and giving her and Keith an opening to get him trapped. You know Keith was the one who told me about the shot you made while he was helping us clean up? He actually sounded pretty impressed that you did it while you were that badly hurt, said he didn’t think they’d have gotten Sendak down without someone else ending up down here if you hadn’t done that. Shiro said he insisted on carrying you down here and keeping an eye on you until we got back. I’ll probably try to tell you this when you’re awake, but you’re going to sulk about it and you probably won’t believe me, so I may as well get it out now.” Hunk laughed. “Anyway we’ve just been fixing things, so Pidge, Corran, and I’ve been buried in machines all day, and Shiro and Keith went to help fix the Arusian village. There’s some other really important stuff, but it can wait until you’re awake and with everyone else again.”

He took a deep breath in the pause and hit the button to open the door, slipping in the back to lean against the wall. Hunk looked back over his shoulder. “I kinda figured you’d come down too.”

He shrugged, making a couple vague gestures at the tube. “Thought I’d check on him before I went to bed.”

“I think we’re all worried. Corran’s been in here something like hourly according to the logs.” The brief humor as Hunk motioned at the control console was weak. “It says everything’s going okay, at least.” 

Keith nodded. There was a long, awkward silence; he shifted weight. “You know I never noticed him back at the Garrison. I didn’t really notice a lot of people. I think I met Pidge’s brother because of him hanging around Shiro and I don’t remember a lot about him, even.” 

“Yeah, from what I saw before you vanished, you were pretty single-minded. When anybody saw you - you were pretty good at disappearing. I don’t think I even remember hearing you talk much when you weren’t arguing with instructors or someone being dumb in class.” 

He gave Hunk an incredulous blink. “You were paying attention?”

“I pay attention to a lot of things. There’s just usually no reason to say anything.” Hunk gave a slightly exaggerated shrug. “And you were hard to miss - almost all of your classes, you were in the front row, you had the textbooks memorized, and you’d usually been digging in related studies enough that you’d correct things on the board.” There was a beat as Hunk thought something over, brows furrowing. “Except that you took the furthest back row you could in Xenobi and the professor practically had to walk back to poke you to get you to say anything.”

“That was because the guy was _creepy_. He was a mad scientist short a Frankenstein setup.” And Keith had some personal reasons to be terrified and not want to draw attention, too. 

“Yeah, he kinda was, wasn’t he.” Hunk laughed, sounding almost fond. “Yanno I heard he hung around conspiracy theory boards?”

Keith tried not to twitch. He knew, and it’d been a bad day for his paranoia when he found out that one of the people involved in taking apart and reconstructing theories about alien hybrids on forums and social site groups was one of the instructors he had to deal with, who DID have resources and authority behind him. “That doesn’t surprise me. At all.”

“Anyway, to be perfectly honest, I think that’s part of Lance’s problem with you.” Hunk rubbed the back of his head thoughtfully, and Keith had a long, awkward pause; he really hoped it wasn’t going where it looked like from the timing. “You know, before we got into the Garrison, we were top of our class? And he was the star of the soccer team, got along well with everyone. He was on the honor rolls all the time, same as I was, he just hated it coming up because he didn’t want to sound like a nerd, and I was better at math than he was. Then we get in, and you’re already there from the early-entry program, you drive the instructors nuts but you’re already in pretty good as a favorite, you’re beating both of our marks all over the place, and you’re way better at the military protocol thing. I don’t think he knows how to deal with that.” 

It took real control to not visibly breathe a sigh of relief that Hunk had just made a really awkward segue. “He’s really not subtle about the competitive bullshit.”

“Yeah, I know. He’ll figure it out sooner or later.” Hunk gave a wry handwave, with a small eyeroll for good measure.

“You know I don’t hate him, right?”

Hunk laughed. “Are you kidding? You keep acting like you want to hover like a mother hen.” He did have his own brief glance back at the pod; Keith was starting to suspect that nervous energy was driving Hunk more than anything else right now. 

He let out a breath, suddenly regretting asking. “You two seem like you know each other pretty well.” It wasn’t a well thought out change of subject attempt, but it was a change of subject attempt. 

“Yeah, since we were pretty little…” Hunk leaned on the console with a fond smile. “I was getting picked on a lot, and one day he just swept in getting right in the other kids’ faces, trading insults and giving as good as we both got, then he grabbed my arm and walked off with me. He’s always been dragging me into loud shenanigans and bad ideas, but he’s right there if I’m hurt or upset, and he’s pretty loud that if anybody has a problem with me, they’ve got a problem with him. His family all kind of adopted me too, without any second thought, and they’re pretty amazing too. All it took for them was Lance walking up saying ‘this is my friend, Hunk’, and suddenly I had a bunch of extra brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins that would all just descend out of nowhere if I was in trouble.” He paused thoughtfully. “I think being that far away from them didn’t help his attitude in the Garrison sometimes, either. His mom and his older sister were a lot of his support.” 

Keith’s shoulders tensed, and he’d folded his arms, stiffening through the entire thing with a funny hard frustrated knot in his chest and throat. He hadn’t realized how much of his attention had focused on a spot on the floor until Hunk had a hand on his shoulder, and he didn’t have time to look up before he’d been pulled into a hug that probably would’ve squeezed part of the air out of him if he hadn’t still been in armor. 

“None of that, okay? You _have_ family now.” Hunk wasn’t giving any opening to pull away, even with a couple firm pats on Keith’s back under the thrusters. “ _We’re_ family. All of us.” Hunk finally released him partway, but just enough to put hands on his shoulders and hold him there while he stared back with a dazed blink; Hunk was holding eye contact, oddly serious. “You heard all that stuff the Princess and Corran have said, right? Sacred trust and bonds and all that?” 

He nodded numbly.

“That means we’re family, and we’re not going to let go of you that easily.” Hunk gave his shoulders a gentle shake; he nodded again. 

Hunk smiled. “Besides, I think his older sister would like you. She’s terrifying.” He clapped Keith’s shoulders, and Keith found himself suddenly afraid of meeting Lance’s family. “Trust me, if we ever get back to Earth, they’ll adopt you too.”

He wasn’t sure if being descended upon by Lance’s family was more or less terrifying than going back to the shack alone; he nodded, and Hunk grinned, trying not to laugh at the deer in headlights face Keith was making. 

Hunk let go, then tugged his wrist over to sit by the console. A while passed on random bits of conversation about the Garrison instructors and classes, then a silent lull that went more subdued as it went. Hunk finally patted his shoulder.

“…Thanks for coming down here like this. I didn’t want to leave him alone, but it’s… really hard seeing him like this.” The cheer Hunk had kept up was finally cracking, and Keith realized Hunk was tearing up a little, hands folded in his lap.

Keith reached over to hesitantly pat Hunk’s shoulder; Hunk sniffed, shoulders shaking, then leaned over to pull him into something that could have been called another hug, sobbing into the shoulder of the armor. Keith managed some awkward shoulder-pats and even more awkward and tone-flat murmurs of “it’ll be okay”, but he mostly just felt like the world’s worst armored stuffed animal. There was a degree of difference he was pretty aware of; he was worried about Lance, and Lance being quiet and still was unnerving and upsetting, but Lance also wasn’t someone he’d grown up with that closely. 

The crying jag wore out eventually, trailing into a few long minutes of Hunk curled around him miserably. He was a little glad for the armor; it might not’ve been the most comforting thing to hug, but it at least meant he didn’t need to remind Hunk to make sure he could breathe. 

“Thanks. I mean it.” Hunk gave a last short squeeze and detangled, helping Keith sit back up straight.

Keith stood up, patting Hunk’s head. “You should get some sleep.” 

“Yeah. You too.” Hunk waved back as he walked out. 

**********************************************

Something nagged at him, and he stopped partway to the dorms, something finally clicking; he’d meant to talk to Shiro.

And Shiro had left the bridge via the elevator to the hangar, not the door out to the main decks.

He was closer to the hangar than he was to the armory, and Paladin armor was a lot easier to deal with than plate mail, so he took the detour to the Black Lion’s hangar first; there was no visible sign of Shiro, but he had a sneaking feeling he was in the right place anyway. 

He looked up at the Black Lion. “Shiro?”

The lion’s eyes flared glowing, and Black crouched down, opening jaws for him to enter. 

He’d only half paid attention to what it was like being inside Blue before; he’d felt like some kind of foreign guest there, but hadn’t known enough at the time to fully understand why, and he hadn’t been fully actively patched into the relay enough for more than a vague sense of presence from the lion. He was not unwelcome, that much was distinct, but Red was a presence in the back of his head while Black was something surrounding now, the warmth he was used to walking into Red replaced by something that was simultaneously blanketing and like he could step off into endless void at any time. 

Black _felt_ bigger, too, in a way that had nothing to do with physical size, something huge and old and battle-scarred. 

And Shiro was either asleep or close to it in the pilot’s seat. He cleared his throat from the back of the cockpit. “Shiro?”

The muffled startle didn’t come with any warning activation from the prosthetic, just an unintelligible half-awake mumble before Shiro leaned around the back of the pilot seat, staring at him as if trying to figure out what he was doing there.

“Black let me in.” He patted the side of the door next to him. It seemed like enough of an answer for Shiro, at least, who stood out of the pilot’s seat to lean against one of the consoles. 

“Are you alright?”

He shrugged. “Kind of? Still a little wound up to sleep, and… I needed to talk to you anyway.”

Shiro nodded slowly. “About earlier?”

“Yeah. How much do you remember?”

Shiro let out a long, slow breath, shoulders slumping. “I don’t know. I’m not sure what they did to me, but - it’s like trying to find a box of loose keys in a ball pit. I can remember your Dread Black Knight routine at the Renfaire but not how we met. I remember you handing me one of the sparring swords around the group you trained with, but not what classes I was taking. I remember you hiding behind curtains at a formal thing the Garrison held because a girl’d asked you to dance, the launch, eating on the Garrison rooftops with Matt, them talking about their family on the trip out, some of the cadets I’d tutored...but not my own family, if I had one, or why the Garrison and space had been so important to you. Sometimes I have something and then it just…goes away.”

It didn’t feel like something that was just an after-effect of trauma, even if that might’ve been an element; Red was growling in the back of his mind, there was a strange wary watchfulness from Black, and it made a sick sort of sense. A weapon with no past was easier to control, and would have fewer potential reasons to disobey. 

“…Shiro I’m not human.” Shiro went still, giving him a blank look of disbelief. “Not entirely, at least. I know I don’t look like it, but -“ He made a couple frustrated, sharp gestures. “Look, all my life I’ve confused doctors and ‘not fit in’. I got to learn the words ‘genetic anomalies’ when I was six. My blood type’s listed as ‘hypothetically’ A-Negative because they couldn’t figure out what it was, I’ve had neurologists stumped looking at brain scans because there’s things that didn’t look like anything they’d ever seen, and that - the thing I did back there - I trained myself not to do it because I got sick of getting called ‘werewolf’ and ‘monster’ as a kid.” 

Shiro’s expression had sobered.

“I don’t _know_ my parents - I barely remember my Dad, I don’t remember my mom at all, and I’m not even sure some days if they’re really my parents. I don’t know if I’m some kind of hybrid and Mom wasn’t human, if I was some kind of experiment someone lost track of, if I was altered somehow or if the only reason I look human is because something got half-assed when I was born to hide it.” He leaned against Black’s bulkhead; there was a warmth from Red in his mind, but leaning on the wall was like leaning against a solid starfield. “That’s why it bothers me when you say you’re not sure you’re all human anymore like it’s something horrifying or means you’re not _you_ , because - if that’s true then what does that make me?”

Shiro’s face fell, and he stared down at the mechanical hand, flexing the fingers. “You’re not a weapon.”

“You don’t know that! Neither of us know that!” He stood from the wall, straight and trying for height, hands at his side like claws. “You know what one of the - least crazy theories I found was?! That some alien race would make _hybrids_ that could pass for human, that they could - use to infiltrate or maybe even use as assassins or something, and look at most of what’s ruling the stars!” He made an angry gesture off at the wall and up. “For all I know, I was _supposed_ to be a weapon and someone screwed up and lost me!” 

“Keith…”

“Don’t. Try to tell me it’s different because it’s you.” He was baring sharp teeth he didn’t have.

“This is how you’ve always been. You’re the same - you that you’ve been all along.” Shiro made a helpless gesture at Keith with his good hand.

“And you’ve been through Hell, but you’ve got all the same habits. Look, I’m not saying you didn’t change; that would have screwed anyone up. But you didn’t change as much as you seem to be afraid of.” He leaned back against the wall, folding his arms, tired enough to have run out of energy on the one outburst. “Trust me. You've been all I had, I would _know_ if you were acting like someone else.”

“…I’ll try.” Shiro leaned back, as much as he could and keep balance with the console. 

“There was something else I wanted to ask you.” He looked away. “Back in the woods… you recognized what I sounded like, didn’t you.” 

Shiro looked up, the kind of blank lost and vaguely alarmed face that could mean he had no idea, could mean he wasn’t sure, could mean he knew and was clinging to denial, and could mean he knew and didn’t want to say.

“You froze. It must’ve sounded like something you remember.”

“I don’t freeze.” It was a very weak defense.

“Shiro you froze in the training bay on the first day. I had to cover you. The robot kicked me into Lance because of it.” He shot Shiro a flat stare; Shiro scratched his head and looked away. “What did I sound like back there?”

Shiro let out a frustrated breath, and held up both hands open in surrender. “Keith, after Mygax, they started throwing everything they could at me. You get growled at, roared at, and snarled at enough, and it all starts sounding the same.” He folded his arms, finally looking up. “Assuming you would sound enough like a pure blooded whatever, and if my memory of that time weren’t still mostly shot, I’m not sure I could tell.”

Keith wilted, deflating into the wall. 

“We’ll find an answer sooner or later.” There were a few moments of silence. “Maybe Allura or Corran might know something?” 

Keith paled, stiffening and shaking his head. It took him a couple minutes to find words, and it was still weak and half-voiced. “You’re the only person I trust with this right now.” 

Shiro rubbed his face. “Understood.”

“I. I have a clue? But it’s.” He reached back for where he would’ve usually worn the knife, grabbing air before he remembered he was in armor and that it was back in his room. “…I have one character in an alien language that isn’t Altaean.” He held up empty hands.

“Well, it’s something.” Shiro stood wearily, crossing the cockpit to rest a hand on Keith’s shoulder. “We’ll figure it out sooner or later, alright? And whatever we find, I won’t think any less of you.” 

Keith leaned in to rest his head on Shiro’s shoulder, something exhausted and a little too boneless to be quite called a hug on his side. Shiro put arms around him, with a few quiet pats of the shoulder armor. Keith stayed there for a while, quietly clinging. After a while, it became a little less tense and more just boneless. 

“You should get out of that armor and get some rest”, Shiro said quietly.

Keith flicked the side of Shiro’s chestplate with one hand, letting the metallic clink answer.

Shiro laughed weakly. “I get it. Come on.” He shifted weight a little, and Keith followed the unspoken direction to head back out; Black let them both out into the hangar. Keith was the first one out of the hangar, Shiro lagging behind a little; one of the mice caught him just outside the door, running up the armor to perch on his shoulder, leaning forward to peer at him studiously with red eyes.

Keith narrowed his eyes at the mouse with a pointy smirk, and whispered, “Not today, Satan.”

The mouse stuck its tongue out at him; Shiro caught up to the door, giving him and the mouse an odd look. Keith just smiled and continued on down the hallway, although a few steps further he looked back, starting to worry. “You still look like Hell. How’re you feeling?”

Shiro thought it over as he walked. “…About medium well.”

Keith stopped walking, lagging just enough to punch Shiro in the arm.


	4. How can I hope to be what I can't believe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith turns out to be less of a threat to Lance's dignity than Hunk, who's known him long enough to have Stories. Coran finally gets a solid appearance to make one of his bids at quietly adopting the new Paladins, and almost says a little too much.
> 
> And Keith gets into a brief argument with Red being a stubborn ball of issues.

When Pidge confessed, Keith stuck with already having guessed and left out how. He wasn’t sure how much of it with the others that had caught on was something psychic, putting other pieces together, or a not-quite-conscious awareness of the relay.

He did take comfort that Lance having apparently second-guessed himself out of existence on Pidge, as loud as she’d been, meant that there was no way in Hell Lance would pick up on anything of his.

*************

The castle ship landed next to the spring where Lance had gotten himself in trouble; Lance had managed to shift around, helmet next to him, hands over his head, draped against the tree sullenly. He actually somehow managed to slink lower as everyone disembarked, Coran and Hunk in the lead. 

Nobody said anything as Coran inspected the cuffs, and nobody really needed to. 

Coran made a few thoughtful noises and tried pressing some kind of small tool along the side of them; Lance jerked in an attempt to pull away with a yell, a burst of swearing, and “OFF NOT TIGHTER”. Coran jumped back, raising both hands apologetically with the tool in one of them. 

“It looks like these things have changed a bit in ten thousand years. We’ll probably have to cut them off.” 

“You’re up, Keith.” Shiro clapped his shoulder with a nudge to go forward, and Lance groaned, slumping against the tree sullenly.

“Just try thinking with this head next time, alright?” He lightly thumped the top of Lance’s head with his knuckles, and got a grumble of profanity in half-unintelligible Spanish.

He knelt down, activating his bayard and cutting through the energy cable that connected the cuffs.

“Hey Lance, look on the bright side.” Hunk was grinning as he spoke, and Lance blanched, shaking his head. “At least you have all your clothes on this time.”

“Hunk…”. Lance shook his head harder, and tried to point over at Allura and Shiro off to the side; Keith growled at him to hold still, catching the wrist to get a look at the still-attached cuff. 

Hunk just grinned wider, and Pidge mirrored it. She elbowed Hunk. “Didn’t security get called that one time at the Garrison?”

“Yeah, because they lost the keys. But hey, at least that girl actually went for help, not like that other one…”

“Huuuunk….” Lance was louder this time, and paying no attention to Keith shearing off one of the cuffs down to his gauntlet on both sides despite holding the arm perfectly still.

“Oh really?” Pidge looked up at Hunk expectantly; Allura raised an eyebrow, while Shiro seemed to be sticking with bemusement and watching the spring. Keith let them go, grabbing Lance’s other wrist.

“Yeah, he found a real winner over break at the Garrison. You were lucky she didn’t take your watch when she took your phone and wallet-”

“HUNK.”

It was the opposite of a deterrent. “It would’ve taken hours to find you out there without being able to GPS it.”

“Hunk you brought my _sister_.” Lance had given up on trying to get Hunk to shut up, but sounded betrayed and wounded anyway.

“Well, yeah. She had a car. You were like, a two hour drive out of town.” Hunk was the opposite of repentant.

Lance somehow managed a limp, sulking drape without moving the wrist Keith was cutting the other cuff off of. 

“Ah, the perils of youth.” Coran sighed wistfully. Lance just scrambled to get up as soon as he heard Keith’s bayard deactivating, grabbing his helmet and making a show of dusting off his armor and straightening it and his hair. 

Allura gave Coran a sidelong, sly glance. “Is this why Father used to cut off so many of your stories when I was a child?”

Coran laughed nervously. “Maybe.”

Pidge had darted forward to pick up one of the cut-off pieces of cuff. “Man, I can’t believe you fell for that. This isn’t even the right kind of cuff for that. It’s not lined or anything.”

Lance froze, snapping around to stare at her. “Pidge?!”

She shrugged, still holding it. “What. You get bored on the internet, you learn things.”

“Well, for your information, I didn’t _see_ it until she’d put them on me. She asked for my hands and said she had a surprise.” He huffed, straightening. 

Pidge just snickered. Keith decided there wasn’t much he could contribute, and wasn’t sure how much he wanted to. He was also not sure he wanted to see more of the inside of Lance’s head. 

Hunk folded his arms, tapping one foot. “So how long did it take you to realize you’d been played after she cuffed you.” 

“Only a couple seconds!” Hunk raised an eyebrow; Lance shrank a little, looking away. “Their ship was already grabbing Blue and she was walking away.”

“Alright, that’s enough.” Shiro stood, shaking his head, but he looked like he was quietly trying not to laugh. “Just… try to be more careful so there isn’t a next time.”

Lance wilted, only putting enough effort into a response to be audible. “I will.”

Shiro hung back, resting a hand on Lance’s shoulder; Keith could have gone around, but waited just behind them quietly, while Hunk and the others paused by the ramp up, almost out of earshot. “Look, everything worked out and that’s the important part. Don’t let it get to you too bad, alright?”

Lance looked up weakly, forcing an attempt at a smile; it seemed like he’d forgotten Keith was behind him and out of line of sight for once.

Shiro raised an eyebrow, not falling for it. “Trust me, we’ve all screwed up before, and all of us are probably going to manage to screw up again at some point. If we’re all looking out for each other, then we can all cover for it when something does happen to keep it from being a disaster - just like what happened here.”

Lance gave a short, faint laugh. “Easy for you to say. You actually know what you’re doing out here.”

Shiro laughed himself - an off-kilter, broken and awkward laugh. “Sort-of. We’re all just doing the best we can.” 

Keith raised an eyebrow; he could lay money that Shiro was having a processing error between trying to comfort Lance with his own screwups, real or imagined, and the routine he was falling into of trying to support everyone else by only showing his own fears and flinches when he thought nobody was looking. It did seem to help Lance’s mood, or Lance remembered that Keith and everyone else could still see him, since Lance mumbled a quiet “thanks” and stepped forward, already going back to his more normal energy level. 

Hunk apparently decided they’d delayed long enough, yelling back at the stragglers, “Alright, let’s go help Shay and everyone else!”

************************

The Altaean ship moved faster than anything Earth had, and was a little faster than the pod, but there was still a good few hours on the bridge. They were getting coached through learning to function as a bridge crew; some of it was Coran, Keith was getting some guidance from Red, and he was pretty sure everyone was getting similar coaching from the lions. 

Particularly considering that none of them could read the Altaean writing everything was in, which meant relying on occasional verbal instructions and the lions feeding memory of “this is what you should be pressing and this is what that means”; Red couldn’t give any kind of technical terms, only concepts, which meant a lot of “the thingie with the whatsit” getting corrected into terms by Coran or Allura, and praying that there was correctly following someone else’s muscle-memory and reflexes.

After a point, active navigation tapered out to just monitoring that everything was continuing as planned, which didn’t take a full bridge crew to handle; it dropped off to Allura and Coran managing most of it while they waited. Keith found himself getting more and more restless, particularly with a creeping awareness of Lance watching him suspiciously, waiting for him to say something. 

They had a little over four hours left before there would be anything he was really needed for, and waiting for their first actual _planned_ mission was its own ball of nerves even without Lance’s paranoid sulking. That gave an hour to burn off nerves in the training bay, get a shower, get rest, and still be ready when they reached the Balmera. 

Finding something to do had always been the best he had for handling nerves. He’d practically rebuilt the shack in the desert once after a close call with someone from the Garrison who would’ve recognized him, watching over the horizon for a few days for aerial search drones. Sometimes he’d been outside well after dark running through sword drills.

The training bay worked better. Some of the drills were rote enough that he didn’t need to focus on them enough to tune out whatever uncertainty was chewing on him, while the drones in the training bay were more like having an actual sparring partner demanding all of his attention and energy without any of the attempts at interaction or questions that went with spending time around the WMA groups. 

He didn’t realize he had an audience until after he dismissed it, deactivating his bayard and turning to find Coran watching from the doorway with a bowl of something that was about as identifiable as anything else Coran brought out of the kitchen. 

He stopped partway to the towel and pouches of water he’d found in a storage room, staring sideways at Coran.

“Well, none of you have really been taking care of yourselves that well, and someone has to make sure you’re in good shape. Not that I can really blame any of you, it hasn’t been a good few days for getting a real breather.” He held out the bowl. “Which means all the more reason to take what chances we have!”

Keith took the few steps forward to reach down and snag the towel and water, not taking his eyes off Coran. Coran didn’t move, just holding the bowl out with a faint smile, absolutely still. 

He took a minute drinking and wrapping the towel around his shoulders, scrubbing off his face, then finally walked over to take it from Coran; he had a strange feeling Coran was going to stay there until he did. Or follow him with it. 

He continued the couple feet past to the wall, flopping down to sit leaning against it, crossing his legs with the bowl. Coran sat down by the wall himself, giving a foot or two of space. 

Keith poked the contents of the bowl with the spoon. It was a sort of beige-orange color, with a little grittier consistency than the usual synthetic. He tried not to grimace; this was probably going to be their life now, since it wasn’t exactly like they could just land at most of the worlds around and beg for supplies. They might be able to raid Galra ships and bases for supplies, but he wasn’t sure if Art of War style “living off the enemy” would be something Allura and the others would agree to. 

It wasn’t the worst thing he’d ever eaten, but it wasn’t something he’d eat given almost any other option. Coran was watching him waiting for a reaction.

“…It tastes like a bad raw soyburger.” Which was edible, at least; he took a few more bites while Coran tilted his head, not following. “Fake ‘meat’ made from a kind of beans.” 

“I thought it would get boring, just staying with the same default synthetics all the time.” He didn’t seem perturbed at all by the tired flat reaction, but then, it wasn’t his fault that all they had access to right now was synthetics, some gifts from the Arusians, and a few things Hunk had managed to forage before things started being on fire. “It’s a different mixture, to help you keep your strength up when under fire!”

He sighed and kept eating; this really was his life now. 

“You make a rather good show of it with a blade. Really all of you have been doing extraordinarily well, considering that I was told your training was civilian - and one wouldn’t know it going by you.”

Keith had to laugh a little. “Swords aren’t military training on Earth right now - it’s all firearms and some hand-to-hand for emergencies. I trained with a group that treated it as a martial art - keeping a piece of history alive.” He waved a hand. “I know how to shoot, but that’s mostly from game hunting.” 

Coran nodded. “I suppose that makes sense for a race that’s only just taking their toddling steps into space. Range is still a preference, but there are some advantages to a good blade, and narrow ship’s hallways cut down much of the disadvantage you’d get in open terrain.” He glanced sideways. “You’ll want to make sure you have one of the others for cover fire planetside if you can, depending on the fight, at least until you get better with the bayard.”

He made a quizzical noise around the spoon, raising an eyebrow.

“Well, the bayard will reflect its wielder, so it will take a default shape best suited to its owner’s skills and aptitudes - but that’s never the only form it can take, and a skilled wielder can reshape it mid-fight to whatever will best suit the circumstances.” Coran folded his hands behind his head, leaning back against the wall and stretching his legs out in front of him. “Some of your predecessors had enough control to go seamlessly through a whole range of weapons in a few moment’s time without missing a beat.” 

Keith hunched his shoulders with a thoughtful noise. “We really are complete dumbass novices.” 

Coran’s brows furrowed. “I know your people don’t have that kind of nervous system tissue there, I’ve dealt with the infirmary monitors.” He gave a headshake and continued, “But … well… you are. You’re also all we’ve got, and you did manage to bring down one of Zarkon’s higher generals. There’s not much we can do but trust that the lions know what they’re doing, and hope that you lot learn fast enough to keep up with what you’re up against.” 

He finished the bowl, setting it aside; it was possible to almost forget Red’s constant presence sometimes when he was preoccupied and Red didn't have input, but the warm flicker was always there. “You know I’d been in the cave where we found Blue a few times over the years, but nothing happened until all five of us were there.” 

Coran made a thoughtful hum. “You don’t seem like you’d work that well with the Blue Lion, and under the circumstances, I doubt they’d want to draw attention to themselves until a suitable pilot arrived.”

“Do you think she’d have woken up if it were just Lance wandering down there?” 

Coran just shrugged. “It’s hard to say. To be perfectly honest?” He had an odd pause. “With the original Paladins, I heard debates about whether it being those five was luck of the draw of who was close to Alfor at the time, or some kind of destiny at work that Alfor had the right specific people drawn there by higher powers somehow. I’m not sure how much it matters either way in the end, and the only ones who would know the why and all are the lions themselves. I don’t think they’d be willing to be careless at all in choosing who to tie themselves to, though.”

He’d noticed an odd feeling of being watched when he’d been in the area where Blue was hidden, above and beyond the flickers of odd dreams and sense of a calling that he now knew had come from Red. “So even before they chose us, they could sense us to see if we were anything they wanted.” There was the beginning of an idea turning over in his mind, and Red was paying attention, watching his pondering cautiously. 

“Well, that’s rather how it works - if they don’t have Paladins, then they won’t even open up until someone compatible they’ve chosen to accept walks up. Of course, while they’re active, there’s been incidents of them allowing someone else at the controls for emergencies, but even that only works if they decide the individual is someone they’re willing to work with and there’s a good enough reason.” Coran folded his arms, looking off at something past the ceiling. “They are living, thinking beings, after all. One of the original paladins said they were pretty sure their lion knew them better than they knew themselves.” 

That caught on something, but he set it aside for the moment; what he could try to ask Red about was a little less immediate, as he looked up to stare narrowly at the way Coran had gone pensive and distant; something felt suspicious. “Is there a reason you’ve never said anything specific about any of them?” 

Coran started, almost losing balance against the wall. “What? Ah - well, I suppose I have been doing that, haven’t I?” He laughed nervously, straightening his jacket collar and moustache. “It’s just… it’s a little hard, you know?” He made an awkward gesture at Keith, and airily at the castle around them. His usual animation drained as he spoke, weariness and grief worming their way loose. “They were around for almost all of my life, and were like part of my own family… it - really was just a couple weeks ago, for us, the last time we saw them all, and - well. Ten thousand years and they’re everyone else’s forgotten legends, for the most part…I don’t think I’m quite ready to entirely face it myself.” 

Keith looked away, suddenly feeling guilty for saying anything; he knew all of that, even if he hadn’t been thinking about it at the time. “…Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.” 

“No, no, it’s…quite alright.” Coran settled back, still not quite back to his usual act yet. “You lot have been pulled into all of this, and it’s a part of your lives now, too. One day it…would probably do us good to talk about it, when there’s been more time to recover from the shock and fewer things are on fire.” 

He nodded. 

“Well, I’ve probably taken up enough of your time.” Coran gathered up the empty bowl, standing. “After this mission sometime, would you mind indulging a bit of a spar? I could use the exercise, shake the dust off from all that time in cryosleep.” 

“Sure thing.” He closed his eyes, resting his head back against the wall; there was an awkward moment before Coran left.

************************

That nagging thought about the lions and the old paladins came back as he went back to the living quarters to get a shower. He was curious about the previous paladins, and about how and why the lions had picked them, but there was something else now where he was seeing an avenue he hadn’t before for one of his own dilemmas. 

If the lions mirrored their life force, had experience with however many different races throughout the universe that they’d been around, and there were differences in the energy of different races, then there was someone else who’d know what he was without having to chase clues. He got dressed and headed for the hangar, to Red, who let him in, albeit with an odd pensive watchfulness. 

He leaned on the back of the pilot’s chair in the cockpit, trying to focus on Red’s presence, around him and in the back of his mind. When he felt a little more confident in having contact that might be enough for something like a conversation, he pulled the knife out of its sheath, unwrapping the cloth that hid the runes, and held it out.

“Have you seen something like this before?”

The lion was thoughtful, almost uncertain; there was some kind of recognition, but it wasn’t very clear, a vague impression of a tall, shadowed figure with a hood. There was some other idea attached; ceremonial didn’t feel like quite the right translation, but there was definitely some kind of significance to it. 

And there was a gulf of time that increased the uncertainty - meanings and peoples changed, there was no way of knowing if anything the lion knew from when it was last active would even apply now.

He re-wrapped the knife and sheathed it; it’d been worth a try, and at least he could hope that it meant they really were likely to cross paths with something related to the source of it at some point. “You see pretty much everything with me, whether I know it or not, right? Tied to my life force?”

There was a cautious acknowledgment.

“Do you know what I am?” He looked up at the ceiling of the cockpit. 

The lion had a hesitant pause, then acknowledged it; Red recognized and could identify whatever else was there that wasn’t human.

“So what am I?” He was hesitant, on edge, and not sure if he was more afraid of not getting an answer, or of what the answer would be.

Red rumbled; it was both in his head and audible around him, a deep, pensive sound, as the lion stayed silent on the answer.

He dug his fingers into the back of the seat, yelling up at the machinery. “Why won’t you tell me?!” His frustration was simmering, close to slipping out of control. He was _tired_ of not knowing if he should hate what he was or not, and just wanted to get it over with.

The lion pushed back, weary and holding back an odd sort of sorrow. He wasn’t ready for the answer, getting it now would do nothing good. He needed to wait. 

He threw everything he could grab at Red mentally - all of the childhood insults and terrorizing, all the “behavioral problems” growing up, the fights, the uncertainty and sense of confused shame that went with every frustrated doctor, the mad search for some kind of explanation when he realized it wasn’t just ‘genetic mutations’, sifting conspiracy forums for answers and finding nothing, days of sitting in the back of the xenobi class in mute terror of what could happen to him if the professor ever realized what he was, every day he spent wobbling between desperately wanting to find his family for answers and terrified of finding them for what it could mean, the creeping sick feeling that had snuck up in the middle of the night they were waiting to leave Arus because Shiro had frozen in some kind of half-remembered terror at the sound of his raised voice - the one person he actually felt safe with terrified of him, even if it was only for a brief moment.

“How could THIS get worse?!” His voice cracked, snarling at the lion, already stinging with wounded betrayal; the one being that he should’ve been able to trust with anything, and it was yanking the answers to something he’d been fighting all his life to find out of his reach.

The temperature in the cockpit rose noticeably, and there was a deep growl around him; the lion’s presence in his mind became a pressure that made it hard to breathe, and there was a very clear intention being considered to turn around, step out of the hangar, and spit him back out into space until he had rethought how he was gauging what fights were worth picking. 

The lion was bigger, the lion was almost older than civilization in the species that had raised him, the lion was not going to take orders or obey attempts at forcing it to do what he wanted. After a few beats of stifling heat, there was another set of reminders - the map of Zarkon’s empire painting half the known universe red, a wall of distress beacons, Pidge’s missing family, Shiro’s fights with his own memory and mind, Allura’s loss, and his own angry rant at Pidge about putting two people over the entire rest of the universe thrown back at him. Did he really think the lion would jeopardize _everything_ it existed for just to spite him over something petty and pointless?

He deflated in defeat, draping miserably over the back of the pilot’s seat with his arms trailing. Red was right about there being more important things to be angry about and it being selfish to risk everything by fighting with the lion, even if he didn’t like it and didn’t like knowing that Red knew the answer and wouldn’t share it. 

The only way he could parse the lion’s immediate reaction was rolling its eyes. The temperature dropped down from “sauna” to “Uncomfortably hot”, and some of the pressure on him let up. 

The universe would not end over this, and the lion grouchily prodded with the lack of intention to keep what it knew from him forever; its intent was to keep it until it was sure that sharing wouldn’t do more harm than good. 

When he was ready to understand it and what it meant, and when he was in a place to deal with it properly. 

“I just…hate not knowing. If it’s something I should be ashamed of and trying to fight, or proud of and embracing, or why _any of it_ happened.”

There was a quieter rumble; he wasn’t sure if it was actually out loud or just in his head. All the lion could give him would be a species; Red didn’t know any more than he did about the how or why, and those would probably be the more important questions anyway. 

He’d lost his temper at something he’d been seeking for at least a couple years, at the being that’d finally given him something that felt like a home, and Red couldn’t actually give him the answers he really needed.

He stood, stepping carefully around to drape bonelessly in the pilot’s seat. “Sorry about that. I guess I really am a pretty pathetic mess, eh?” No idea how to relate to others to the point that he wasn’t even sure how to trust something that was in his head, sharing his mind and part of his being.

The temperature dropped down a few more degrees, to match a more familiar desert heat; the warmth in the back of his mind curled around as he stopped stiffening away from it. 

The rumble turned into a thoughtful purr. Red couldn’t afford to be careless who was allowed at the controls. There was some kind of distant sorrow; he wasn’t sure if it was concern over what they had to face, or a past tragedy that hadn’t been escaped from.

Honestly, both pretty neatly described the situation as he knew it; they’d been turned on, the Altaeans that had built them had been wiped out, and there were ten thousand years of damage done to work on undoing.

Red had an odd considering pause, then just settled to keeping the oddly comforting environmental heat and sense of presence. Everything would come in time; the lions had waited ten thousand years, they could all handle a little longer.


	5. Ghosts and devils come a calling - calling my name, lost in the fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Balmerans fumble through not needing to live in fear anymore. Not everyone among the paladins is a stranger to eating bugs, and sleeping on crystal formations on a giant living powerful entity is a bad idea when you're tied to a mechanical god-beast. 
> 
> Or a good idea, if you want to see a little too much about some of your comrades and bits of the distant past.

Keith hadn’t been anticipating having some kind of friendly harbor again so soon, but the Balmerans, unsteadily finding their footing, were an entirely different scenario than the Arusians, who had their village and were confident in their identity and relative agency. It wasn’t the kind of party Lance had been picturing.

There was something of a feast, pulled together hastily on the surface, but most other trappings of celebration were long-lost tales dimly remembered. A few of the Balmerans had lived close enough to the surface in the tunnels to see the sky, sun, and stars in brief glimpses while crossing the pits that covered the creature’s surface, but none of them had been allowed under it for longer than it took to get from one place to another.

They were in the middle of an entire race that was dazedly wandering out of their prisons, caught between the relief of a long torment being over and a lack of knowledge of anything else. 

Allura was in and out of consciousness; Coran and a few of the older Balmerans had met in the middle, building a nest of blankets and pillows under the castle for her. The older Altaean never strayed far from standing watch over her, although he was hardly alone; there was a steady procession of Balmerans hesitantly approaching to pay respects, and Shay’s grandmother had insisted on bringing a large pot of a thin broth meant for nursing the sick to her. She’d fallen asleep more than once over a mug of it.

They were being held in a different sort of awe, one that even seemed to sober Lance when he didn’t think anyone was looking. On Arus they were legends by accidents of luck. Here they were legends because they’d changed history, rewrote all the laws of how the world worked in a day, and brought life back to half-forgotten “children’s fables” of outsiders that did something besides take and terrorize. 

The lions were at rest where they’d landed around the castle; none of them were bothering with the odd spherical shields they seemed to bring up whenever in questionable circumstances. Occasionally Balmeran children would slink up uncertainly to touch them in awe before darting off, while older Balmerans would bow their heads walking by. Keith spent a little while helping re-secure ladders going down toward the caves, but there wasn’t as much immediate that needed doing. Some of the Balmerans were already making plans to break down the Galra wreckage for salvage, but most seemed content to take their time reacquainting themselves with the surface and the sky, or to sit and commune with the rejuvenated Balmera.

Hunk had insisted on helping cook, past all of the Balmeran’s first objections that he’d done more than enough for them; he was swiftly in the middle of a number of Balmerans of varying ages, including Shay and part of her family, happily coming and going with large pots and various containers and utensils. The bits of conversation Keith caught in passing mostly seemed to be Hunk being enraptured by the Balmeran’s traditions and stories, and the older Balmerans being thrilled to have an outsider that was happy to hear it. There were a couple of fire pits where they’d brought out some kind of insectoid creatures the size of large pigs, built in between a pillbug and a beetle, with faintly iridescent grey-black shells and rows of legs on the underside. The bigger bugs were just set in the smoldering “wood” of larger mushroom-like growth, to cook in the shells. 

“A long time ago they came in all gleaming colors”, one of the older Balmerans had said in passing, holding a scrap of jewelry made from worn and battered jewel-like pieces of carapace where they could see it. “Perhaps we will see it again soon.”

Shiro and Black had settled near to the castle, although it only put them near the center of the places the Balmerans had been gathering; Keith found everyone else closer to the castle. Allura’s pile of blankets had moved closer to the edge; she was awake, drinking broth while Shay’s grandmother sat beside her, hovering. Coran was almost dozing against one of the pylons. Pidge was perched up on a piece of crystal next to the ship, intent on studying it with a light panel over her gauntlet, and Lance was leaning against one of the castle’s side pylons nearby, looking a little dazed. 

“I don’t think you’re going to get your parade.”

“They wouldn’t even know what a parade was”, Pidge added. 

Lance, for once, didn’t seem inclined to take offense. “Yeah. It’s kind of…horrifying. I think I see why this got to Hunk so badly.”

“We’ll be seeing a lot more like this.” 

The old Balmeran tugged the blankets around Allura closer, tutting at her wearily bitter comment. “Do not try to carry all of the universe at once, child. Rest and have peace while you can.” 

Allura sighed, leaning on the old woman. “I will try. It is just…overwhelming to think about.”

Lance straightened, expression brightening. “Well, we won here, right? And back on Arus, so all we gotta do is just keep this up!”

“I hate to say it, but he’s got a point.” Keith settled sitting cross-legged by the pylon. “Just focus on one step at a time and don’t get too far ahead of yourself.” 

“Easier for you to say. You’re not the ones sifting through ten thousand years of records.”

“You know we could help with that if you wanted.” Pidge had shifted to drape over the edge of the crystal. “I mean, I know I could help with that. We might want to adjust the sorting algorithms, though, they probably weren’t meant to make sense of that big of a backlog.” 

Allura looked uncertain, but Coran held up a hand. “I would certainly welcome the help. Right now the archives look like the last stomach of a Weblum on a bad day.” 

“I could use another project.” Pidge grinned. “And if we can get a better system for calculating events and movements, we can probably work out something predictive that would help with planning a lot of other things, too.” It was a tactically useful suggestion, but the ulterior motive wasn’t hard to guess, either; finding movement patterns and which worlds had work camps would mean something she could use to find her family.

The princess had a calculating moment that was probably coming to the same conclusion, but it passed; she smiled, relaxing to lean more against the old Balmeran. “Thank you. I’m not sure what I’d do without all of you.”

“We’re happy to be of help, princess.” 

“So you’re going to help review records?” Pidge almost oozed a little further to lean over the edge, giving Lance a predatory grin.

It neatly whacked reality into his beginning of a flirting attempt, and he froze awkwardly, shoulders slumping. “Yeah, I guess I am.” 

“I’m not that great with computers, but I can read over things and put notes in.” Keith shrugged; it couldn’t be that far off from studying holocaust history, just on a larger scale. 

“See, child? You have no need to carry this weight alone. You have others, and as long as that is true, you will always be able to survive.” She gave Allura a gentle hug, one big clawed hand wrapped around the princess’s shoulder. Allura nodded, a gesture that was turning into nodding off. 

Shay led a few of the other Balmerans over, Hunk proudly in the middle of them; two of them were jointly carrying a cauldron as big as either of them, while Hunk and another had a battered black metal platter that was probably made from some cast-off Galra salvage, with a large piece of some kind of seasoned white meat that looked almost like the world’s biggest lobster tail.

Which, Keith would wager, came from one of the larger insectoids they’d been cooking. 

Pidge slid bonelessly off the crystal to land neatly on the ground to sit beside the pylon, bright at the promise of non-goo food no matter what it was at this point. Shiro managed to materialize from somewhere off the other side of the pylons, as if he’d been shadowing the procession before they arrived. Once the cauldron and platter were set out on a rock, Hunk was cheerfully helping pour out bowls and carve pieces off the meat for everyone there. 

Lance’s enthusiasm gained a visible edge of being an act when Hunk reached the “cave bug” part of announcing it as “roasted genler with root and cave bug stew”. Pidge briefly looked nervous, but stared at the bowl for a while, shrugged, and ate without much more comment than a few odd looks. Coran looked like he was politely surviving, while Shiro just seemed happy to have food that wasn’t synthetics. 

Keith didn’t have much problem with it, albeit taking some time to get used to unfamiliar roots and flavors; it was very rich, with strong, sharp spices that weren’t particularly bitter, but were very noticeable. 

Then he noticed Lance edging to be sitting closer. It continued until Lance was well within “personal space bubble” and Keith had stopped eating to stare suspiciously at him sidelong. Lance didn’t even seem to be paying attention, continuing to edge closer until he was close enough for there to be ambient physical contact shoulder-to-shoulder and Keith was outright glaring at him.

Lance was mostly watching everyone else, and at some point, nudged some of the roasted bugs in the stew into Keith’s nearby bowl.

“…What are you _doing_?”, Keith hissed. 

Lance was sticking to just a little above a whisper and trying to not look like he was talking much. “I am not up for eating alien bugs yet, but I don’t want to insult them, and I know _you_ don’t care after that popcorn tin of betrayal in your shack.”

He stared at Lance. “Look, you live in the desert like that, and you take what you can get. Besides, it’s not like it was anything that bad.”

“You roasted scorpions.”

“Yeah, and?” He’d stopped caring about more than ‘is it edible’ when he’d resorted to going survivalist; he was pretty sure being a fussy eater would be dicey in any environment, but scrub desert elevated it to near-suicide. 

Lance made a couple incredulous noises and gestured at him. He hunched over his bowl, eating, with the conclusion that he might accept Lance’s proximity, but he didn’t have to enjoy it. Lance, meanwhile, just paused to watch Shiro half-inhaling the food, and for once, he actually was giving Shiro an odd, bewildered headtilt.

Shiro looked up with a faint mumble, taking a moment to swallow. “What? It’s pretty good. And it’s not like it’s still moving or anything.”

Lance was silent for a few long moments, visibly concluding that he didn’t want to know, then returned to eating the mushroom-like parts and vegetables out of his stew while sneaking the bugs into Keith’s bowl. He didn’t seem to have thought twice about the other sliced meat beyond a quiet mumble of surprise that there was something like lobster all the way out here; Keith debated telling him what it came from, but decided he wasn’t that cruel. 

Also Shiro was right there within earshot and would probably get after him if he did.

He did, however, have a comment on the bugs in the stew being a bit like cicadas; Lance’s brief twitch betrayed that it was probably a small share of revenge for Lance invading his space. Pidge had briefly watched the two of them, but decided not to care at some point, ignoring them, while Hunk disappeared off with the Balmerans again at some point. 

The day remained oddly quiet, with a general air of dazed relief. Pidge went back to her inspection of the crystals, bringing her gauntlet’s panel back up; now that he was closer, Keith noticed she’d rigged a shell to use part of her laptop’s interface on the light screen in English, rather than being completely dependent on deciphering Altaean. 

Shiro found a rock to sit on where he could see further, and was content to sit back and watch the Balmerans; he actually seemed more at peace than Keith had seen him in years. Keith began fidgeting with his own gauntlet, trying to get the hang of navigating what was there while relying on Red for translations of concepts, a very hit and miss way to work.

Lance was growing restless, and sidled over to Shay’s grandmother.

“It’s been pretty quiet around here.” 

She nodded, Allura drowsing in her lap. 

“Do you guys do music at all? Singing, dancing, instruments, anything?”

The old woman had a pensive pause. “Once, we did. Then it was outlawed. For a long time we have preserved what little we can in deep places, quietly, where none would hear.”

“They outlawed music?!” Lance was horrified and looked a little sickened. 

She nodded. 

Lance faltered, needing a couple beats to recover, dredging up an encouraging, lopsided smile as he edged closer. “Well, they’re gone now, so they can’t stop you anymore, right?”

She smiled absently, shifting a few stray hairs of Allura’s back into place. “I suppose so.” The old Balmeran started humming; it was quiet, piecing together bits of melody. Allura stirred with a mumble, then a faltering attempt at joining in.

“You remember?” The Balmeran’s voice was a little choked.

“Of course I do… for me it was only a few cycles ago, when my father last completed the ritual. I remember the great horns, shell drums, and the way the Balmera itself sang…”. Allura tried to sit up; her balance wasn’t there yet, and the old woman gently supported her, helping her up to lean against the Balmeran’s shoulder. 

Allura’s attempt had more confidence and volume, but was uneven; she had a good voice and certainly knew how to use it, but the tune wasn’t one she was as practiced with, the alien words not always forming right. It was an odd thing to listen to; whatever effect allowed them to understand the various aliens worked, an overlay of hearing it in a familiar language, but the sound of the partly tonal language carried through, impossible to separate from the melody and rhythm. 

Several of the other Balmerans in the area froze, turning to stare in awe. After a couple bars, Shay’s grandmother joined in, hesitantly finding her own voice and the confidence to put any volume to it; the reflexive uncertainty made her waver sometimes, but she seemed to almost lapse into a trance, the words coming far more easily to her.

It was a hymn of some kind, of the interdependence of life; halfway through a verse, one of the children nearby joined in, timed for a round. It was slow at first, and many of them had the reflex to scan their surroundings and flinch, but one of the younger adults joined in further back, then another out of sight around a rock formation. It spread as more and more of them tested their newfound freedom, echoing off the crystals that seemed to chime and faintly pulse with it.

There was something low, at first just a sense of vibration through the ground they were sitting on; Keith’s gauntlet screen vanished, dismissed, while Pidge’s started fritzing, turning colors and scrambling as the tones from the crystals grew more distinct. The vibration had turned to a low thrumming running under the Balmeran’s singing that seemed to embolden them. 

Lance and Shiro seemed to notice it a few seconds after Keith, although Shiro was distracted, staring in worried awe at his prosthetic and flexing the fingers stiffly, faint arcs of violet light running up his arm with pulses timed to match the crystals. The lions stirred, glowing eyes off around them and newly brightened presences turning attention, adding their own triumphant rumble. The low thrum grew into the almost whale song they’d heard before. It was no longer pained, and was matching a counterpoint to the Balmerans, a near tangible flood of sound that could be felt to the bone as much as heard. Allura seemed to be in a trance of her own, smiling distantly with her voice lost among all of the others.

There was, finally, a sense of more concrete joy among the relief that echoed across the Balmera’s surface for a good hour before it finally began to taper off. It didn’t completely stop, as individual Balmerans could be heard here and there for the rest of the night testing a few bars of different bits of music, but as they returned to their picking up and exploring, the Balmera quieted to a contended, barely audible hum. 

The relative quiet and still was almost disorienting after that, and the clear area around the castle stayed silent for a few long minutes. It was broken by a small, stifled noise, Allura wiping away tears.

“I was not sure I would ever hear anything like that ever again…”

The old Balmeran wrapped her arm and the blanket around the princess. “You gave this back to us. All of you.”

Allura leaned into her with a distant smile, already drifting off to sleep again. 

Lance sat still, then flopped back to lay sprawled against the stone with a slowly spreading grin. “Man, who even needs a parade after that.”

Shiro slid off his rock, walking over, still flexing his arm and fingers as if testing them. He was smiling, at least, still mostly relaxed. 

It was a good thing Keith was a little worried, but was having a hard time not smiling after that. “You alright?”

“Yeah. Just got a little interference, I think. It wasn’t … bad? Just unexpected.”

Keith didn’t doubt that the Empire was perfectly happy to erase cultures just to break the people, but after that, he was pretty sure they were afraid of the Balmeran’s traditions for more than just risk of uprising. 

The old Balmeran had turned, focus zeroing in on Shiro in concern. “Your arm…”

Shiro’s smile weakened. He reached up with his good hand to hit the catches on his armor' the right gauntlet and vambraces opened, and he slid it off. The old woman gasped quietly, a sharp noise as he held it up. “A gift from Zarkon, when I was held captive.”

She murmured, bowing her head, and yet there was still an odd sense of shared understanding. 

Keith went restless again not long after that, wandering the area; he realized, walking past the lions, that while they’d settled again, the Balmerans were having a rather dramatically different reaction to them than the Arusians had. He didn’t think he got near any of them without seeing at least one or two Balmeran children running up to rest a hand against them, hands faintly glowing briefly before running away, giggling. Occasionally one of the grown Balmerans would wander up, more cautiously, folding hands and bowing respectfully before putting a hand to them for a few moments. 

The lions were purring; he realized he’d been catching it from Red continuously enough for it to have turned into mental white noise, and it was audible going close to the others. 

On the one hand, it was a little weird, seeing other beings running up to interact with them; on the other, after seeing them talk to the Balmera, it somehow felt like it shouldn’t have been a surprise at all. 

One of the Balmeran children running up to press a string of bright glittery red glass beads into his hand, closing his hand around it with a fast “For the Guardian Spirit of Fire” before dashing off, was a little more disorienting, even though it seemed to amuse Red with what he swore was a bit of an ego puff.

As it grew later in the day, the spotty sleep of the last few weeks was starting to catch up. He took the minimal effort to leave his armor in Red’s cockpit, tying the string of glass beads to rest under his shirt, but didn’t want to stay inside when there was no telling when they’d have an open sky and a vaguely friendly area again. 

He found a good ledge high up on a crystal formation near Red, folded his jacket up as a pillow, and curled up; he could afford to catch some rest as he could. 

He wasn’t sure if it was exhaustion or having something like a sense of relative security for once listening to the low thrumming of the Balmera, but he drifted off surprisingly easily.

His dreams were oddly vivid fragments, nothing staying consistent for very long.

He was in one of the dorm rooms back at the Garrison, his tablet half-forgotten on the blanket because he was half-asleep, curled up against Shiro; Shiro was paging through a textbook, no serious scars yet and with both hands intact. There was someone else in the room talking to Shiro occasionally, quietly, but the conversation mostly just registered as ambient noise and presence, something about classwork for a course he hadn’t reached yet.

He was on his feet on bloodied sand, breathing hard; there was harsh lighting that didn’t quite cut through the gloom caused by a lack of windows and dark walls and ceiling, the space oppressive despite being huge. His arm and hand were bleeding, a deep gash running down from the elbow that made it hard to hold onto a sword, but there was a large, heavily scaled dead beast with long claws and nothing else in the arena. The crowd had turned into white noise long ago, a background din over panic and desperation. 

The crowd suddenly hushed; he turned out of stiff rote routine, to salute a balcony overlooking the arena, high enough to be well out of the reach of even the larger and more agile creatures they’d thrown in. Zarkon stood at the edge of it, looking down; a thin figure in a dark hooded robe, white hair straying out from under the hood, leaned over his shoulder in some sort of exchange that had he Galra Emperor tilting his head thoughtfully, giving an occasional small nod. 

Whatever had been said, the second figure pulled back, out of any good line of sight to someplace further back on the balcony, and Zarkon’s attention focused more fully on the sands. 

“Tell me, Champion. Do you wish to improve your station?”

His breath caught, even as there was a sickened knot in his stomach. It was a trap, it was an opportunity, nothing good could come of it but it might be the only chance, a wall of mimicking someone else’s bravado was all the defense he had to cover his own vulnerability and that of everyone else he’d shoved out of the way, if he flinched he wouldn’t be the only one suffering for it. “Of course, Emperor!”

Zarkon gave something like a smile that made his blood run cold. 

There were trees and grass, bright sun, blue skies, an open field and a dog running ahead to stop every few feet, looking back; he? Was out of breath trying to keep up, but things were secure and safe, home behind in easy reach with family watching from the porch.

Ocean stretched out under a long dock and off to the horizon, the sun sinking in the sky with a cool sea breeze tempering tropical heat. A couple of smaller someones were running along the other side of the dock, stifling laughter in a badly failed attempt to sneak up. 

“Man, it’s a beautiful day out here. Not a care in the world, just peace and quiet.” 

Another couple of stifled giggles, and he was smirking, keeping his back to it and feigning ignorance - maybe not well, but there was an attempt.

He could hear a whispered “go, go!”, and then there was the scuffling of someone smaller charging at him; he waited until the last second to sidestep, a younger brother in swim trunks skidding straight over the edge of the dock and into the ocean, coming up sputtering and laughing despite protests of “No fair!”. He knelt down to hold a hand out to help his brother back up onto the dock.

“You’re going to have to try harder than that to get one over on me.” 

And then the second younger sibling tackled him into the water from behind.

There was an island that he’d never seen except in pictures, but it felt familiar in a kind of childhood nostalgic way. Galra generators ran up the sides of a great volcano, a battlecruiser hung overhead, and there were drones and Galra soldiers in the streets; he managed just enough lucidity to put pieces together and start trying to search for Hunk, not bothering to question being turned loose on his own in Hunk’s nightmares. There were earthquakes starting on top of the invasion, the island threatening to tear itself apart; a deep crevasse tore open in the street he was darting across, and he staggered in the quake, falling into lava below.

The heat was uncomfortable, but it was more like hitting the surface of water than it should have been, passing a membrane rather than hitting something thick and hot enough to turn flesh to cinders. After a few moments of drifting, it thinned to a thick, stifling air, flames flickering around in all directions. He wasn’t sure how he found something solid and stable enough to walk on, but it was working. He caught sight of Red watching him, almost a translucent presence over the flames; there was a perturbed rumble that seemed like more a physical sensation than a sound. 

“Red?!” 

He tried to force his way through the flames, hot air pushing every which way.

He shouldn’t be there; he wasn’t strong enough for it yet, it was something liable to consume him if he tried to grab for it too hard. 

The lion tensed and there was an echoing roar; he fell through the invisible ground he’d been walking on, the flames vanishing into darkness.

The deafening silence turned to a din of voices; laughter and conversation, many of the voices nonhuman, muffled as if on the other side of a door. The world was floating and spinning and he felt a little queasy; someone half again his size was carrying him in something closer to “gangly oversized child” than bridal-style. There was an occasional, very faint, thoughtful inhuman rumble; it was both an unfamiliar sound and something familiar and safe enough to be comforting.

And then he was dropped onto a curved padded “couch” that was thoroughly familiar, one of the resting lounges in the Castle. “He” groaned and it wasn’t his own voice; he could hear the other person take a few steps across to the other side and sit down heavily.

“I can’t believe you tried to drink eight glasses of Proxian ale in one night.” The rumbling voice was familiar and soothing, the rumbling voice was something that belonged in nightmares and shouldn’t be affectionately chiding. He cracked an eyelid to look over at Zarkon, draped languidly across the couch; the lights in the lounge were turned down to a quarter. Zarkon was only in a very flimsy hint of armor, something ceremonial and decorative over an embroidered robe; the scar down his face didn’t exist, and he looked much less battered around the edges. 

“Well, they kept offering, and I didn’t want to offend them.” In some distant background, he recognized “his” voice, although he wasn’t sure how - Alfor’s voice.

Zarkon inclined his head in something close to an eyeroll. “I can’t always be there to look out for you, you know.” 

“Well, that’s fine. I can look after myself.” Even though the thought of sitting up made the way the world seemed to tilt around him worse, and was enough to make the show of confidence falter. Zarkon leaned the side of his face against a hand with a bemused noise of disbelief.

There was a small shape behind the Galra, white hair and a lighter dress easy to spot in the dim light, moving quietly and trying to stay low; a couple moments later, there was a flower crown dropped on Zarkon’s head from behind, Allura - still a small child - abusing the way the couches were recessed into the floor to get around the massive height difference.

Zarkon sat straighter in startle, but only briefly, and left the flower crown where it was. Allura had no problem using his shoulder and forearm as a stepladder to flop down on the couch next to him, and Zarkon held still for it.

“I told you I’d manage to get one on you.”

“Yes, yes you did.” Zarkon gave a resigned sigh, gently patting her head with one large clawed hand; Allura beamed, proud of herself.

It was the sort of contented image that would be a comfort for years and yet held a painful ache of sorrow, it was an image that made him want to claw through the years to grab her and keep her away from the Galra Emperor. 

There was someone calling his name, and the dizzying image faded to black. Then there was someone poking his ribs, and he woke up slowly to Pidge and one of the Balmerans leaning over him, looking worried for a couple beats. 

“…What.”

Pidge let out a breath in relief. The Balmeran - Rax - shook his head with a sigh.

“This one did not think you were wanting to seek visions.” Rax was very matter-of-fact about it, as if it was some kind of obvious conclusion he should’ve known about.

Pidge gestured down to the ground, where Coran was waiting. “Rax saw you up here and came to get us. It’s apparently not a great idea for us to fall asleep on them like that.”

He gave an incoherent grumble and flopped a hand over his face, a bleary prelude to rubbing his eyes and sitting up stiffly. 

“Are you okay?” She was back to faintly worried. Rax didn’t look concerned, just boredly unimpressed.

He scrubbed his face with one hand. “Yeah. Just had the weirdest dreams.”

“Of _course_ you did, sleeping on a Balmera’s crystals like that!”, Coran called up from below. 

Pidge slid off, easily going from outcropping to outcropping back to the ground; Rax followed right after, more graceful than most humans would expect of someone his size and bulk; but then he did seem to be lanky by Balmeran standards. Keith was groggy enough to be clumsy, and almost lost his footing when he hit ground, Rax moving closer to catch him if he fell. Coran had his arms folded, shaking his head, but didn’t look alarmed, at least.

He gave Coran an expectant look, waiting for explanation.

“Those crystals are an incredibly intricate and powerful form of pure solidified quintessence that are _also_ parts of a very powerful living being; they can cause all sorts of odd interference to anything in contact with them, and are powerful amplifiers for other abilities besides. I don’t know how common psychic ability or magic are for humans, but as a Paladin alone you have a share of your lion’s energy and a bond that can leave you wide open.”

“So that’s why the weird vivid dreams that weren’t mine. Got it.” 

Pidge opened her mouth, almost questioning, then closed her mouth, shifting weight uncomfortably. 

He rubbed the back of his head, briefly debating whether he should ask or not. “…When the lions were hidden, did their paladins hide them?”

Coran gave him an odd look, but it was a little more thoughtfully concerned than confused. “Some of them.”

Rax was studying Keith, mulling something over.

Tired overrode any better sense little voice telling him it was an awkward and painful question. “Who was Red’s original Paladin?”

Coran raised an eyebrow. “Why do you ask?”

He shifted. “Either I got something of theirs or I got something else Red had picked up on somehow.” He shook his head, trying to shake off the groggy. If he’d read the situation right Alfor was one of the original Paladins, but he would’ve expected Alfor to be Black’s, not Red’s; besides, Alfor and Allura had a connection to all of the lions that might mean any of them could pick up on it. “…Was Zarkon always an enemy of yours?”

Coran stiffened; he spoke with the careful cadence of a great deal of caution in choosing words. “There was a time when the Galra and the Altaeans were allies.”

Rax stiffened, suddenly listening very intently.

He gave Coran’s guarded answer a very tired shrug. “It was some kind of diplomatic ball or something. He was teasing King Alfor over being very, _very_ drunk. They were both younger.” 

Coran let out a slow breath, his shoulders relaxing. Keith wasn’t sure what to make of that being a relief, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to ask; the paranoid part of him wanted to suspect Coran was hiding something he should worry about, the part of him that was trying to be self-aware that not everyone was out to get him was pretty aware that there were a lot of minefields Coran would want to avoid on that subject. Pidge looked between them, her concern shifting to Coran. Rax looked like he was considering the paranoia end of the scale.

The relief had only lasted for a brief moment anyway, replaced by tinges of tired grief. “That’s part of what makes it harder.” Coran looked away. “…Could you not bring this up to Allura?”

“Wasn’t planning on it.” It was hard enough for Coran, who seemed to be pretty settled; Allura had more than enough to worry about without someone she barely knew bringing up some probably now-painful memory from her father’s perspective. 

“Thank you.” Coran walked over, a hand on his shoulder to steady him. “Let’s get you back to the others before you fall over.” 

Rax mirrored Coran on the other side, motioning to the Altaean that he had it; Keith allowed it, grudgingly, as Coran stepped away. 

“Your people were allies of Zarkon’s?” Rax was sticking with cautiously guarded, at least.

Coran sighed. “And his first target when he decided to build his empire. When King Alfor put Allura into cryo-sleep, he asked me to go with her, to make she had someone to protect her if the worst happened. Neither of us thought the worst would be ten thousand years.”

“And he was once a friend.”

Coran nodded sadly. “A long time ago, when he was a very different person.”

“Do you hold sympathy for him?”

Coran stopped walking, and there was a change in his posture and tone that banished any question why Alfor would think of Coran as a bodyguard for his daughter. “Only sorrow for what might have been; he has gone far past any forgiveness.”

He resumed walking, his posture slipping tired again. Rax looked down at Keith. “You saw his past.” The Balmeran didn’t seem sure if he was suspicious or pitying.

“It makes it worse.”

Rax tilted his head queastioningly.

“Alfor thought of him as a brother, _trusted_ him, and he burned everything Alfor ever cared about.” Keith was snarling with more vehemence than he’d thought he had energy for. 

Rax faltered, missing a step, but recovered fast when that almost threw off Keith’s still-dazed balance. Keith noticed that Rax’s posture had shifted, standing less tall, and that the Balmeran was actively avoiding looking at him.

Something had struck a nerve, and he had the funny suspicion Hunk’s narrative of their previous narrow escape had left out a few parts. A moment later he realized Coran was watching them over his shoulder, but as soon as Keith looked back up fully, Coran was watching the path ahead again.

When they got back to the Castle, Rax herded him to sit over by Shay’s grandmother and Allura, nudging his shoulder for him to sit; Allura was asleep, while the old Balmeran handed him a bowl with more of the broth, then patted his shoulder with a quiet, knowing look. Lance looked between them, tilting his head with a questioning look.

“…I had everybody _else’s_ dreams and nightmares and memories and crap. Do any of you _really_ want me to talk about it?”

Lance’s curiosity flagged, and he suddenly found a rock fascinating, Pidge looked back at her computer readout, and Shiro grimaced with a flinch. 

“Didn’t think so.” He hunched over, curling around the bowl, and Coran sighed, rubbing his forehead. He at least knew better than to try and remind them that they were apparently _supposed_ to be in each other’s heads, with “no secrets”. 

Rax was still shifting with shame, and after that was settled, he walked over to Shiro, looking down as he spoke; his words were measured out, stiff. “This one wishes to speak to the Black Lion, to ask forgiveness and advice.” 

Shiro looked over at where the Black Lion was sitting, with the same steady trickle of Balmeran children and an occasional grown Balmeran that’d been going on all day. He looked back at Rax, almost confused at the request for permission, shrugged, and gestured to the Lion. “Go ahead. It’s more his decision than mine anyway.” 

Keith had a funny suspicion the question was because “asking advice” was probably a little more involved than the greetings and paying respects everyone else was doing. 

Rax put his hand against the lion, going still; after a few moments, the Lion’s eyes lit dimly, the purring slowing. The light around Rax’s hand turned dark, a black and violet haze with flickers of stars; Shiro walked over to stop nearby, hovering worriedly. 

It drug on for a few long minutes, and then it stopped, Rax staggering backwards and falling over. His tail would have hit the ground hard if Shiro hadn’t dove to catch him, supporting the taller alien awkwardly. 

“Are you alright?”

Rax was not making any real effort to stand, still dazed; he shook his head a couple times, before giving Shiro a lost look of confusion.

Shiro helped Rax over to the space under the castle, making sure he was settled on the ground safely; the Balmeran slumped forward, hands on the ground, chin resting on folded knees.

“This one sees why Zarkon fears you now, Guardian Spirit of the Heavens…” It was weakly addressed to Shiro, who stiffened and went confused at the title. “They are only barely awake, and their presence is vast enough to make our Balmera seem small.” 

Coran didn’t seem to be at all surprised by the titles, and Keith shot him the ‘answers later’ frown. 

Shiro sat down nearby, looking sobered. “What did he say?”

Rax looked away, shaking his head with a slow, measured breath in and out. “This one has been more of a fool than realized. This one saw where the path kept before led, and was no different than those who harmed us.”

Shiro tilted his head.

“…This one was forgiven - because this one had realized own error, if not the magnitude. This one was afraid, and angry; this one thought nothing of leaving others to the Galra, betraying them even, if it might mean the Galra passed over own family.” Rax’s formal speech patterns had gone even more halting, fumbling through it. Rax mumbled something meant for only Shiro to hear, but Keith was pretty sure he caught Zarkon’s name.

Shiro rested his good hand on Rax’s shoulder, moving to sit closer by. “That’s how it always is. It’s easier to tell ourselves the monsters are monsters, that we could never be like them…but nobody thinks of themselves as the villain. It’s always ‘protecting our own’ or ‘they deserved it’ or ‘we deserved more than them’; ‘I did what I had to’ or ‘I had no choice.’” 

Rax made a quiet noise.

“Look, you know better now, alright? None of us can avoid becoming the monsters if we’re too busy pretending they’re not people to realize when we start sounding like them. And I know you came around when it mattered - I saw you with the others that came to help us.” He offered the Balmeran a cautious smile; Rax looked up weakly, but put a hand over Shiro’s.

“This o… _I_ need to talk to Shay. And Hunk.” Rax levered up standing, using his tail as much as his hands, and walked off, out of the clearing area.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Honestly I am batting at the theory about Coran's "Following in your footsteps" line re: Alfor and Red, although *I'm* unsure on that one enough to stick with being able to easily hedge it.
> 
> And this got long enough that I decided to give Hunk and Shay their date in peace off-camera.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Okay, the first part of this is referencing the comics (which're set while Allura's recovering from healing the Balmera) and picks up at the end of them. 
> 
> Also calling the mouse "Satan" finally catches up with Keith.

Kythylian Mu had turned amiable enough after they finished dealing with the string of tests and challenges. Keith was beginning to see where Allura got her sensibilities for springing “training exercises” on them; she learned from Coran, he was just far better at playing it off so it didn’t look like they’d been thrown into something insane for “practice”. 

Coran was lucky it was hard to be too angry over it when there had been a legitimate threat in there that would’ve done a lot of damage if they hadn’t dealt with it…and when he hadn’t used them for target practice.

The pigment in the names engraved into the table had long ago worn out, although Coran swore that ten thousand years ago they had been colored to match their paladins; they’d all lost track of which seat he’d pointed out before as being marked with Alfor’s name in Altaean. None of them could read the Altaean script to tell what the other names were. He tried asking Red, who was amused by the question; he wasn’t sure if what came through was garbled because the connection wasn’t good enough yet for something that specific, or if Red was doing her own equivalent of “I can’t hear you, you’re breaking up”. 

Coran and Kythylian had shared a fondly long-suffering look at the initial musical chairs as they stared awkwardly at the names, trying to figure out what was Alfor’s seat - so each of them could pawn it on someone else rather than deal with the awkward. Coran’s response when asked had been, “If you’re going to be like that about it, I’m not telling you.”

One of Kythylian’s people had asked for orders once they did sort out seats, and got five blank stares as they all realized they could neither read any of the signs, nor identify what anything was if they could read it. 

Coran sighed, gave the “They’re from a bit of a backwater, still getting their feet wet” explanation and used some Altaean term that Red roughly noted as a category for “this kind of ballpark metabolically is safe” and told the alien to surprise them.

Coran barely finished saying that when Kythylian pulled him of earshot; it wasn’t hard to do in the din. Whatever quiet conversation they were having looked serious, Kythylian leaning down to avoid anyone else overhearing and Coran going weary and grave. The Mu pointed at Shiro a couple of times, and at them in general throughout it, and a couple times there were more teeth showing than Keith felt comfortable with. Then Kythylian straightened to his full height, giving Coran a shaded, considering look, and nodded, with some last resigned comment that Coran just shrugged to.

They came back to the table around when one of the aliens tending the place brought a tray of drinks in tall glasses; it looked like a couple of different colored liquids had been poured in so that they’d form bands that were slowly diffusing into each other. There was a large bowl of some kind of thin, grilled strips of something reddish.

It was apparently some kind of smoked meat. He thought. He wasn’t sure. There was a decent spice kick to it, and it was good enough that he just didn’t feel like questioning it. 

Coran slid a chair in between two of the others, pulling a drink off the tray; Kythylian leaned against an unoccupied larger chair just behind him.

“You know, it is good to see this table properly occupied again.” The big alien motioned with a long-clawed hand to all of them. “Don’t worry about the tab, it’s on the house for taking care of that thing. And the pearl.” 

“I have to admit, this isn’t the sort of place I’d have expected kings and all to hang around.” Hunk seemed to have reached the same conclusion about the food, although Keith was pretty sure Hunk had sailed past the threshold for “Gave up on worrying about what alien food is” back on the Balmera. 

Kythylian laughed. “Alfor got around, especially after the Lions came on the scene; he wasn't the hands-off type. Hard to rile if you weren't wrecking someone's life, but damn sharp, and stubborn to boot. He was also a _hell_ of a lot better of a gambler than Coran here.” The Mu clapped a claw around the back of Coran’s chair and his shoulder all at once; Coran rolled his eyes and grumbled. 

“I wonder how much of this Allura’s heard about.” Lance was idly toying with one of the grilled strips, chewing on it occasionally. 

“Heavily edited versions for some of it. I think she caught on to that a while ago, however.” Coran sipped on his drink, and Kythylian snickered.

“How much of that was a couple of the others sabotaging his censorship?”

Coran gave a long suffering sigh and motioned at a couple of seats; it caused a little bit of awkwardness that one seat was occupied by Shiro, the other by Pidge at his left and next to Coran. She looked up from taking apart the strip of food to try and identify it, unsure if she wanted to be connected to whatever it was. Kythylian tilted his head, nictating membrane going over his eyes, and muttered something that only Coran would’ve been able to hear well about the lions and memories.

Coran went wistful and distant, then shook his head. 

Keith had been through a handful of the questionably meat strips by the time he tested the drink; he at least had learned his lesson about drinking alien liquor on an empty stomach. By that point it’d pretty well mixed; there was definitely nunvil in the mix, but the two liquors it was mixed with offset it a lot better than drinking it straight, even if the salt tang mixed with sweet was a little odd. It also didn’t seem nearly as bitter or rancid as what they’d had before, but he had a sneaking suspicion _that_ had to do with Coran’s supply probably having only questionably survived 10,000 years. 

Hunk was tilting his glass to mix it, more interested in the food anyway; he’d gotten a little more at ease at the table as Kythylian and Coran razzed each other. “It kinda helps, hearing about things like that. The last paladins being people, you know, rather than some kind of big legends to live up to.”

Kythylian made an odd huff noise. “I’ve seen a lot of heroes and villains come and go, kid, and that’s what they all are. People all focus on the spectacular stuff they did, so after a generation or two, the guy who’d drag in here with his comrades all looking like they got hit by a train and razzing each other over who did what sounds like an all-knowing, untouchable god.” 

“You mean Alfor?”, Keith asked, raising an eyebrow; it sounded like Kythylian’s earlier description, the teasing comment he still wasn’t sure what to make of in the memory. 

The Mu snorted. “Maybe.” After a brief fond headshake, he continued, gesturing with his claws occasionally. “Look, I’m pretty sure in a few months I’m gonna start hearing epic stories about you kids, and they’re never gonna include all the screaming, panic, and making things up as you go. Your predecessors earned being legends that’re still passed around, but they did it by being the same kind of stubborn flailing dumbasses you’ve all gotta be to’ve gotten the Lions picking you. They just heard things like ‘nobody could win that’ or ‘that’s impossible to change’ and said ‘watch me’.” 

“That’s actually really comforting.” Hunk smiled, leaning back in the chair. 

‘And villains’ being in there had Keith feeling oddly wary, even though he knew he wasn’t always the best judge of when something was suspicious.

Kythylian stayed by the table for a good couple hours, chatting as a couple courses of food were brought out; he stuck to some vague general reminiscing about their predecessors, always veering away to change the subject whenever Coran started to go distant or stiffen. He was amiably curious about all of them, although his “Man, I’ve never gotten anyone from your planet before even” questions were all carefully calculated to avoid Shiro unless one of them mentioned something first. Despite a lack of knowledge of Earth, his occasional comments on them were eerily sharp. Coran was more than happy to encourage them to talk about themselves, even if half of what was said about Keith came in fragments from Shiro, or was prompted by Shiro bringing up something he didn’t clearly remember. 

It was better food than Keith’d had since the Garrison’d held a sponsors’ ball; he’d faltered out of the conversation at first, falling back to just eat and listen to everyone else talk. He saw Kythylian watching him a few times for that, then caught another brief gauging glance when the drink caught up and he got a little more involved.

He at least managed to hedge the liquor before his accent crept in too badly, but Kythylian didn’t ask, and none of the others commented on it. 

As everything wound down, he moved from standing behind Coran’s chair to rest a clawed hand around Shiro’s shoulder, holding up the other hand for attention; he’d turned more serious.

“Just so all of you know, Zarkon does have prices on your heads. What’s been circulating the news only has glimpses of armor for most of you; you can probably get away with going into some civilian areas if you’re careful and out of uniform.” He patted Shiro’s bad shoulder, and Shiro craned to look up nervously. “Except you.” 

The silence at the table stilled.

“The gladiatoral matches get broadcast. You set the reputation for your species to half the universe, and they’ve got you in the bounties as a traitor to the Empire.” 

Shiro paled, looking queasy; Keith reached over to put a hand on the prosthetic resting on the table, and Shiro briefly flinched, almost pulling it away. Keith wrapped his hand around the metal wrist insistently, and saw the Mu’s eye on that side turn to track the movement. Pidge shifted her chair a little closer, and Keith was pretty sure the Mu noticed that, too; Lance and Hunk leaned in across the table. 

He didn’t comment or otherwise move to indicate he’d noticed. “Zarkon’s got no friends here, and I think I’ve made it pretty clear how welcome anybody aiming at you near my turf will be by hanging around the table, but watch yourselves on your way back.” 

Shiro nodded, stiff. 

Kythylian leaned in closer, head next to Shiro’s; he was big enough to keep hands around both of Shiro’s shoulders, an armor-plated wall curling around the back of the chair. “Breathe.” He waited, tapping Shiro’s chest with a claw insistently until Shiro let out a long breath, then started tapping like a timer, claw clicking slow and regular on the breastplate. “You sent a bigger message than you realize just getting away.” The Mu’s head straightened a little, eyes flicking around the table; he stayed there until Shiro’s posture had gone a little less stiff, as everyone was casting awkward, worried glances. “And listen to the other kids a bit more, alright?”

He stood, dropping a huge claw on Shiro’s head to ruffle his hair; it was still there, Shiro awkwardly blinking between curved talons, when he craned his head to Coran. “You look after that princess and these kids - I’m gonna hold you to that bet.” 

Coran saluted, and Kythylian rose fully, walking away from the table with a lazy wave. 

*************

Allura was looking better by the time they got back to the castle, although Coran made a few worried noises of frustration when she met them coming in from the hangars, the mice on her shoulders. 

“How were the traditional training grounds?”

“We never saw them.” Lance elbowed Coran. “We got hijacked to go run errands for some guy Coran owed money and then had to deal with a planet eating death monster.”

Allura’s brows furrowed, then recognition dawned. “You took them to meet the Mu?”

Keith at least thought it was a lucky break that there was apparently only one person Coran owed money to that would still be alive. 

“I thought the traditional grounds might be watched, and knew Kythylian would be able to help with suitable alternatives.” Coran shrugged. 

“Likely prudent; we hardly have any ability to scout ahead very well.” 

“Have you ever met the Mu?”, Hunk asked.

“No; Father never took me into the more lawless regions. I only know of him via reputation, and stories.” She had a pensive pause. “I should like to meet him one day.” 

“We’ll have to bring you with us next time.” 

Allura smiled at Shiro for that; Coran made a small cut off frustrated noise at him, which earned a baleful glare from Allura.

“I am not a child anymore, Coran. I am fighting this war as much as anyone else here.” 

“Well, no, but it’s still dangerous-”

The glare intensified. “When I am recovered, if you are still concerned about my ability to take care of myself, you are more than welcome to test me on the training deck.” 

Coran stepped back, raising his hands in surrender and shrinking. “That will be quite all right, Princess.”

The glare lingered for a few moments before it faded.

One of the mice squeaked something, and Keith tried to stifle a reflexive sense of dread. Allura smiled, but it was one of the sly, unsettling ones. “By the way, Keith, the mice already have names.”

He was not going to react, even though he was pretty sure there was an oncoming train. “Makes sense.” They had, after all, apparently been Allura’s pets for a long time.

“Then why were you trying to name them? You could have just asked.” She was back to bright and friendly, which was worse when he had a suspicion what this was about. There were a few glances from the others in varying shades of confusion and amusement.

“He apparently just does things like that. Living in the middle of nowhere too long, you know?” 

He shot Lance a look that was equal parts venomous and confused.

“What? I’m not the guy who named a rattlesnake.” Lance rolled his eyes.

“Jack lived out there before I did.” Keith was very matter of fact about the big diamondback that often hung around in the area of the shack.

Pidge and Hunk had reached almost keeping score. Shiro just looked tired, struggling to have faith that they could have a conversation outside of a mission without bickering.

“You know those things kill people, right?” 

“Only when some idiot insists on harassing them.” He folded his arms, giving Lance a pointed look. Shiro cleared his throat, and they both turned to pointedly not look at each other. 

Allura looked between them to make sure they were done, although she seemed fondly entertained by the posturing. “…anyway. His name is Plachu.”

Keith nodded.

“What was Keith trying to call him?” Hunk was smiling, and Keith had a suspicion Hunk knew he was snatching away a chance to weasel out of something.

“Satan.” Allura was amused and utterly oblivious. Everyone else from Earth turned to stare at him in varying stages of disbelief, except Hunk in back, who was still smiling.

“Keith, why were you calling the mouse Satan?” It was Shiro’s exasperated ‘I thought better of you because I forgot you revert to a petty eight year old sometimes’ voice.

The mouse was smug on Allura’s shoulder. Keith glared at him. “He knows what he did.”

Shiro was not impressed, and looked like he was quietly either praying for guidance or praying for alcohol.

Coran announced he was going to check on the engines and left; he had a clue and was not going to get involved.

The more cheerful, innocently friendly quality had gone back out of Allura’s smile; she could damn well read everyone else’s reactions. She also knew why he’d have an adversarial relationship with the mouse that seemed determined to spy on him, but to everyone else, it would be Keith getting caught out being an ass to her pets. “And what does that mean?”

“It was a figure of speech. Satan’s basically a demon that works by trickery and fooling people into thinking he’s harmless so he can get them to destroy themselves.” He knew it was not something that sounded great for him, but if he was going under the bus on this one he would damn well get there himself, and he punctuated the grouchy and unrepentant explanation with a sharp glare at the offending, and equally unrepentant, rodent. 

Shiro buried his face in his good hand with a quiet groan. 

“What’d he do, steal your phone or something?” Lance didn’t sound impressed either. 

Keith didn’t answer, just giving the mouse another glare. Allura seemed a little too amused, not even trying for anything other than schadenfreude. 

“Anyway, we’re back now, and there’s plenty to be doing.” Shiro put a hand on Keith’s shoulder, but it had a tug nudging him away from trying to have a stare down with Plachu.

“On that note, I think I have an early model for the sorting algorithms for the records”, Pidge said, apparently done judging Keith for having a feud with a rodent for the day. “I’m gonna go to the bridge to test it out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (For the really curious: Kythylian’s exchange with Coran was checking whether or not Coran had told them who the previous Black Paladin was, and him catching that Shiro did _not_ have a bayard, ergo Zarkon still had it; the last comment was essentially “That’s going to bite you all on the ass”. The quip about memories was them all actually ending up in their predecessor’s seats, aka Zarkon and the original Green Paladin being the ones that kept ‘correcting’ and de-censoring Alfor’s stories to Allura.)


	7. Words are Underrated Anyhow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After slogging through some of the ten thousand years backlog of signals and communications, Lance starts off Sanity Cultural Exchange. Keith and Pidge have another short bit of paranoia bonding.
> 
> And then Keith being bad at life choices when tired makes it impossible to avoid dreams starting to leak across the relay.

Pidge did, in fact, get the algorithm working, although the explanation went on for almost five minutes.

“…And most importantly, to make it easier to slog through, anything older than three thousand years is archived and history flagged; it’ll only come up if you’re specifically searching for relevant keywords, and will be filed under anything more recent. More than one thousand years is also historically archived, but it’ll show as relevant linked in any data file with shared keywords for things like location or names. I also tried to sort different kinds of distress calls or reports of battles but I’m not sure how well that worked? Anyway this should make it a lot easier to get the Castle’s records up to date.”

Keith had discovered that you could, in fact, lean-drape over the light panels on the consoles. Lance had just opted for flopping backwards, bonelessly oozing arms over the sides of his console’s chair. Allura was actually relatively attentive, but Keith was pretty sure it was partly the kind of glazed over one did to convince professors you were paying attention, no really. 

“So essentially, it’s now prioritizing recent information unless we specifically look for something older, and you gave a boost to organization systems that weren’t meant to process ten thousand years worth of data all at once.” 

Or maybe she had been paying attention.

“Yeah, basically.” Pidge shrugged, settling at her console. “I’ve got it set to automatically divide the things to review; Lance, you get planetary status changes. Keith, you have battle reports to try and sort troop movements and areas of interest. I’m taking anything related to prisoner movements, work camps, and that kind of thing. Allura, you’ve got actual distress calls and potentially allied communications, since you’ll know better than the rest of us what we might be able to work with to get some backup and resources.” 

Keith raised an eyebrow, seeing the ulterior motive in Pidge’s assignments, but honestly, her personal stake would probably just drive her to be more thorough about it. Allura opened her mouth, apparently noticing that Pidge had nudged her away from the more horrific reports, but closed her mouth, because it wasn’t like anyone on the bridge would know enough about other races potentially, nevermind expecting them to navigate diplomacy.

It turned out to be a mind-numbing task of essentially double-checking the computer’s work, relying heavily on Red for translation. It was a little encouraging that there were periodic uprisings within even longer-held Galra territory, but none of them seemed to last incredibly long; the groups that had the best luck surviving seemed to do it by strike-and-fade tactics without actually attaching themselves to any particular system or area, going nomadic. 

And Zarkon was not above Consequences for other civilizations helping them or sheltering them. It didn’t always come quickly - at some point he was almost curious to check the older “historical” sections to see if his idea of “how long is a rational time span between an offense and retaliation” had grown longer and more distorted over the centuries. It made an effective intimidation tactic, turning ‘punishment’ into something civilizations would never know if they’d ‘earned’ or not save by avoiding even the appearance of resistance. Individuals and identifiable ships or smaller groups had much shorter spans of time between striking and getting pursued.

The battle-related transmissions they’d gotten that weren’t horrific or conquests were almost more worrying in other ways. Some were pursuit of pirates that attacked civilian ships and settlements, which they were more than happy to draw attention to as proofs they were bringing order to the universe. Some were publicized making examples of insurgent groups, rebellions, and pirates that focused on Imperial installations. There were disaster relief missions publicized, although he noticed they always seemed to be places that had some kind of function of value that wasn’t too heavily weighted toward slave labor. 

Just enough propoganda and shows of ‘protecting the citizens of the Empire’ to keep populations that were “loyal and useful” pacified and willing to turn on dissenters or anybody painted as “threats to the status quo”. 

After a few hours, Lance draped back across his chair. “Dios mio. Does this place have an auditorium or something with a good size screen? I think I need to go watch something cheerful, like Schindler’s List.” 

Allura stopped before she answered, giving a quizzical look; she understood sarcasm, and was learning to check cultural references before assuming meaning. 

“It’s an old Earth movie about a factory owner trying to smuggle people out of reach of a genocide that happened on our world. It’s pretty depressing.” Pidge shot Lance an accusatory glare on the last sentence, and Keith could almost hear an unspoken jab about getting her to watch it without warning.

“I didn’t know you didn’t know what it was.” He held up his hands in defense without sitting up. “And at least that’s just one country and it _ended_ in - God I can’t believe that looks like a sane span of time now.” 

Allura turned distant, staring sadly at her own console. “I wish that this weren’t the reality of our situation.” 

“It just means we need to keep going, because it doesn’t look like it’s going to end any sooner if we don’t.” Although Keith couldn’t argue that it was getting exhausting to slog through. 

Lance grumbled something incoherent, then sat up. “There is one thing I noticed that’s bugging me though. I keep finding this thing where there’s a life-bearing planet. There’s related tags for uprising attempts or helping insurgents or something. It gets flagged as actively militarily occupied. Then like…a hundred years later, it’s empty and flagged as completely uninhabitable…and that seems like it’s getting shorter and shorter.” 

Keith frowned at his console; sure enough, he could find several of the concentrations of military that had settled and then dispersed linked to records Lance had checked. “…Yeah, I see it too. They occupy the place and put it on restricted lockdown for a while.” 

“…And a few of them are still occupied as mining colonies.” Pidge was intent on her screen, trying to be mission-focused on it, but there were cracks where her calm was wobbling. 

Allura’s expression had flattened, eyes narrowing. “I don’t like the sound of that either.” 

“Any clue what they’re doing?” Lance flopped forward, folding his arms on the light screen and resting his chin on it.

She shook her head. “Not at the moment, but - that is definitely something we need to get to the bottom of.” 

Then Lance’s console cut out, sending him flailing to the ground. 

Keith snickered, earning a pause in Lance’s scramble back to his feet as he glared up and flipped Keith off. It did nothing to curb Keith’s amusement.

Allura was already entering something into her console, and a second later had Coran on the intercom. 

“Yes princess?”

“Do you have anything logged about the bridge consoles? One of them just deactivated suddenly.”

Coran thought for a few long moments, giving a tired sigh and pulling up a light panel on his end to scan down. “Nnnooo, I’m not seeing that already logged. I’ll add it to the list.” He tapped the entry into the panel. “Anything else?”

“Not that I know of so far.” She looked over; Keith was taking the interruption as a chance for a break, Pidge was checking that Lance’s work hadn’t been lost, and Lance was standing, nudging his bridge chair with one foot suspiciously.

“Well, I hope you don’t mind that I’m borrowing Hunk for a few hours. Honestly at this rate I might ask to steal Pidge for a bit as well - between the damage Sendak did, repairs from the skirmishes we’ve had, and maintenance checks after ten thousand years untended, there’s rather a lot of work for one man.” 

“Sure thing, I’ll be right down.” Pidge closed her screen and left the bridge; Allura dismissed hers, leaning forward tiredly. 

“Any luck on your end, Princess?” Lance was, occasionally, capable of business before flirting, apparently.

“Many heroic deaths, requests for backup that did not exist to answer, and places with little to no military sending distress calls because they were raided for minor insurrections or attacked and conquered for whatever the Galra thought they could gain.” She shook her head slowly. “So, no. It seems any potential allies are so beleaguered they will need a rescue first, if they’re still alive.”

“They’ve been working pretty hard at terrorizing anybody who looks like they might fight back.” Keith dismissed his screen and leaned back, lacing his hands behind his head. 

“It’s a wonder he can keep anything functional”, she grumbled bitterly. 

Keith took a slow breath that got him a raised eyebrow from her; he’d seen a clue but he wasn’t sure how to word it without risking sounding like an asshole. “He’s had ten thousand years to figure out where the line is on keeping some places stable enough to decide they don’t care what happens to their neighbors.”

“That’s kind of depressing, Keith.” Lance had returned to his chair, draping over the side. 

“It’s how regimes like this always work.” He closed his eyes. “Give enough rewards to supporters that are willing to throw others under the bus to keep favor. Keep enough working and enough stable for a lot of the population to decide it’s not worth risking their necks and maybe it’s not so bad because hey, they're not the targets right now, right?” It came out incredibly bitter; it wasn’t really any different from any of the Earth tyrannies, Zarkon had just done better at keeping it somewhat sustainable, avoiding implosion or fatal overreaching. 

“…Yeah. Still depressing.” 

“It wouldn’t be possible to maintain it for ten thousand years if the rest of the Galra hadn’t been willing to stay behind him on it, either.” Allura folded her arms, frowning off into the distance. “I’m not sure I want to check the ‘historical’ archives to see how far back one would need to go to find some sign of any significant number of them questioning his rule or showing signs of conscience.”

“Who knows how long they’ve been raised being indoctrinated that they’re ‘inherently superior’ and ‘bringing order to the universe’ by all of this.” Keith sank down in his chair, folding his arms in front of him. “And being encouraged to turn on or rat out anyone who isn’t falling in line, too.” 

Lance stared between them. “Geez, could you lighten up a little?”

“It won’t go away just because we find it unpleasant to think about”, Allura said, flatly.

“…Well…No… but do we really _have_ to spend this much time obsessing over it? I don’t know about you, but if I don’t start coming up for air from this shit sometime, I’m gonna go stir crazy.” 

Three of the mice ran up his console, one climbing onto his head, two of the others to his shoulders; all three of them seemed to be folding their arms and staring pointedly at Allura. Plachu lagged behind, but only because he made a stop on the arm of Keith’s chair to shoot Keith a seperate pointed look.

She sighed. “I suppose you have a point.” 

He brightened up, smiling. “So _is_ there some place with a good screen? Pidge finally got something to get our stuff working with the castle, and I’ve got a bunch of Earth movies on my phone to swap if this place has anything Altaean.” 

Keith was pretty sure Lance was either forgetting he was sitting a little behind and in between where the two of them were sitting, or was willfully tuning out his existence. He thought about commenting, but the half-skeptical look Allura was giving him was probably a good indicator that she didn’t need a chaperone.

She brought up a smaller light panel, hitting a few commands, and brought up what would normally be the large screen used for outside views or some communications, covering part of the bridge in front of the crystal. “I think we can arrange something.” 

“…I’m kind of interested in the Altaean stuff, too.” 

Lance’s cheer faltered at the reminder Keith was there; he shot Keith a dim look. “Don’t you have robots to pick on in the training bay or something?”

Allura didn’t even entirely glance back, but she was getting that calculating smile again. “I would _love_ the chance to share Altaean culture with any of you, and I certainly wouldn’t mind learning more of your world.” 

Lance gave Keith one more despairing, grumpy look. Keith was trying not to be too smug, but was utterly failing, having already lapsed into a comfortable smirk. Lance sighed, refocusing his attention on Allura as if resolving to ignore Keith as much as possible. 

Lance’s contribution was ancient black and white science fiction; “Day the Earth Stood Still” was well outside of what Keith had encountered, and Keith suspected Lance was (probably wisely) staying away from hostile-aliens movies. It seemed to have been not a bad idea, as Allura seemed fond of the affably diplomatic “alien” lead, if a little wistful of an implied universe where setting aside petty conflicts was an assumed prerequisite to interstellar travel and trailing off into commentary on the logistical and ethical flaws in using doomsday robots to scorched-earth enforce it. 

It was a lot more thoughtful of a movie than he’d expected from Lance, but then, Lance also seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of old pop culture and ‘what will impress the girl’ was definitely a major motive. 

Allura managed to find something from her childhood that was apparently loosely based on one of her ancestors who was involved in early interstellar travel; she had a few teasing comments about the adaptation being about as accurate as the Earth movie had been in predictions. It definitely felt like there was a lot of things kludged for narrative’s sake, but there was an emphasis on the alien races, worlds, and cultures over the Altaean princess doing her best to learn to navigate them. 

“Man, one of these days we’ve got to show you Star Trek.”

Lance turned in his chair to stare at Keith. “You were into Star Trek?”

Allura stared at both of them blankly.

“Yeah?” Keith shifted in his chair, answering Lance with grouchy confusion that definitely carried a bit of ‘wanna make something of it’.

“Space, the Final Frontier?” It was framed suspiciously.

Keith rolled his eyes. Lance was really expecting him to not actually know it. “These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise, it’s five year mission, to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” He folded his arms and glared back at Lance.

Allura had decided to be unimpressed with both of them.

“Do you have any on you?” They might’ve only had personal devices, but if Lance was half the obsessive hoarder he suspected, there was probably a decent magpie hoard of movies and TV crammed on his phone or keychain storage somewhere. 

“Of course I do!” Lance actually sounded offended.

“Great. We’ll have to make sure we get Shiro for that, too.” 

Shiro was the reason Keith knew it, after all.

“I wouldn’t mind making a habit of this, as we have time”, Allura offered. “We could include everyone.” 

Something in Lance’s expression flagged, but not badly. “I’d be much happier with that kind of team bonding exercise, Princess.” 

She yawned, levering to stand from her chair. “You were right, I do feel better for that - but I think we should all be trying to get some sleep.”

“I need to catch Pidge first… I told her I’d give her something once she got those chargers working.” Keith stood, stopping short of turning to leave at feeling Lance giving him one of the jealously suspicious stares.

“When did you get cozy with Pidge?”

Allura gave the mice, still perched on Lance, a despairing look. The largest one on Lance’s shoulder sighed heavily, and Plachu shook his head. 

Keith looked back over his shoulder, tired and irritated. “She’s my teammate too, now, and Kerberos was personal for both of us.” 

He shoved his hands in his pockets and walked out; before the door closed, he felt tiny claws on his pants leg and a light weight scaling him while he walked.

Sure enough, Plachu had climbed to his shoulder. He raised an eyebrow at the mouse, then decided to ignore him while getting his tablet and seeking out Pidge. 

He found Pidge in the Green Lion’s hangar; her laptop was set up on a crate with cables connecting it to a spread of extra instruments and a couple of Altaean devices. She was asleep, curled up in front of it, glasses still desperately clinging to one ear after being mostly shoved off her face. There was a holding stand with the cracked Galra crystal leaning awkwardly in the middle. Going near it made his skin crawl, even if it was disconnected and harmless now.

He walked over to Pidge, taking a moment to walk around where she was asleep, making sure she didn’t have her bayard on her. He didn’t think it was there, but she was also curled up weird where it could’ve been under her coat somewhere. 

“Hey, Pidge.”

There was no response.

“…Pidge, wake up.”

Still no response.

He looked up at the Green Lion. “I’m counting on you to keep her from zapping me if I wake her up.”

There wasn’t a response; he had a vague suspicion the lion was amused, but he wasn’t sure if he was picking up on it or just guessing. He wasn’t entirely sure how violent Pidge’s reflexes for getting suddenly woken up were, but he somehow suspected that even without major trauma she was paranoid enough to be dangerous.

He sat down cross-legged next to Pidge, and reached over at arm’s length to nudge her shoulder. “Hey. Pidge.”

She did come up swinging, although it was uncoordinated and flailing; the way she caught his sleeve, he had half a suspicion he’d have gotten bitten if she’d taken another second to wake up and her off-kilter glasses hadn’t been in the way. 

She stared at him over his arm. “…Keith?”

He held up his other hand with the tablet. “I was going to get you those files now that you’ve got the chargers working.” 

“Oh. Right.” Pidge straightened her clothes, twisting to sit up, and fixed her glasses. “Thanks.” 

Now that he had his right hand back, he fidgeted in one of his belt pouches for a moment, fishing past a utility knife, a small suture kit, and a compass for a small flash drive, plugging it into the side of the tablet. “I don’t know how much of it will be that useful. There’s a few copies of reports I’d found that looked like they might be something, but if you were around the same circles you probably already have a lot of them.” He might have been there longer if she didn’t get into conspiracy theory circles before Kerberos, but the more sound stories tended to linger in the community. “The big part of it is videos and photos from going out investigating sites. There’s a couple folders flagged for the other areas we found paintings or carvings that might be connected to the caves where we found Blue.” 

The files transferred to the drive quickly; he unplugged it and handed it over. 

“I don’t know how much of it is things we wouldn’t have an easier time finding out asking the aliens, at this point.” He folded his arms, looking sideways; proof of alien existence and signs of ancient contact were a lot less exciting when sitting on an ancient ship probably made by one of the races involved in whatever had happened.

“Well…if it’s related to things around how the lions got hidden, then probably not. Allura got knocked out before they were scattered, and Coran’s job was making sure she and the castle were safe before going cryosleep himself. The Galra don’t know or they’d have found the lions long ago. It might be clues to more of what happened back then.” As she spoke, she turned to plug it into her laptop, copying everything to it. “…’Sky Warrior’s Tomb’?” She looked over her shoulder, eyebrow raised at Keith.

“Yeah, it’s a site up in Montana. There’s a few cave paintings you can get to on foot, and a hidden tomb I had to rappel through a waterfall to get to.” He laughed a little; he’d had more than enough line to make it to the bottom if he hadn’t managed to guess at the entrance. “I never bothered the actual burial, but there were some grave goods that weren’t human-made, and the main painting in the tomb had lions as a major motif.” 

Pidge went through the folder; Keith could see thumbnails of photos going by as she skimmed them, pensive. “Have you shown this to Allura or Coran?”

He paused, caught off-guard; she was skimming through the progression of paintings depicting the story - a strange warrior from the sky pursued by ‘monsters’ that he now suspected were the local people’s attempt at interpreting Galra. 

“If it’s someone connected to the lions, then it might be someone they knew.” 

He flagged himself; she was right, and he’d been too preoccupied to think about it. 

There was a little shift of claws on his head, as Plachu clung to his bangs to hang upside down in his face. 

“Hey, if I don’t catch her first for this, you’re more than welcome to let her know.” 

The mouse gave a sort of self-satisfied squeak, turning on his forehead to climb back up; he grimaced and had to close his eyes as his hair got shoved into them by the mouse’s weight. 

Pidge watched this, and he could almost see dots connecting, her expression going from furrowed confusion to calculating to frustrated outrage.

“Oh you little traitors! _That’s_ how she knew!”

Plachu shifted on his head; he couldn’t see what the mouse was doing.

“Now you know why I called him Satan.”

The squeak from his head was smug and unrepentant. 

Pidge wasn’t addressing Keith’s comment; her attention was entirely on the mouse. “I trusted you guys!” 

Plachu gave another squeak with no signs of guilt whatsoever. 

“See if I ever talk about anything important around you again, you little snitch!” She finally pulled her attention off the mouse, dropping her gaze the couple inches back to Keith. “You’re right. He is Satan.” 

Keith could’ve sworn he heard Plachu laughing into his hair. 

“Anyway, it’s late. Or what passes for it.” It wasn’t like they had a solar cycle to time things by in space. “And I don’t think it’s a great idea to sleep in the same room as that thing. It still feels creepy.” He jerked a thumb at the Galra crystal, then unfolded to stand up.

Pidge started to protest, but ended up yawning. “Alright, fine, I’ll get to bed.” 

He turned to walk out, stopping in the door to pointedly look back; she looked up, closed the laptop, and started putting things back in her bag. 

When he got to his room, Plachu had to move to his head as he took his jacket off, hanging it up; he stopped to stare up at the mouse as best he could.

“Are you _really_ going to watch me strip? Is that _really_ what Allura wants to know about?”

One of the mouse’s ears twitched; the staredown was short and Keith definitely had the upper hand in it before Plachu jumped off his head to squirm into some near-invisible opening in the paneling and vanish. 

**********************

He woke up tangled in blankets, hazily awake and with a muddled sense of awkward confusion. Somewhere in between not being entirely sure of species and being damn short on reasons to relax around other people, never mind having a list of higher priorities to worry about, sex had never really been a huge concern. It didn’t really help that the people willing to try to pursue him through his evasions and avoidance were also creepy about it; people hitting on him, especially persistently, was an alarm bell and that didn’t help his interest in the idea either. 

Which made any kind of dream related to it that wasn’t a nightmare bizarre and confusing. 

Then a list of tiny details sank in that definitely weren’t his, and he buried his face in his pillow with a strangled noise, suddenly not wanting to go back to sleep no matter how tired he was.

He really did not want to see that much of the inside of Lance’s head.

When he was more awake he’d admit to himself, maybe Shiro in private if pressed, that he did not always make good decisions when short on sleep and frustrated. At the time, however, not wanting to go back to sleep while Lance was asleep had a clear solution, and he was going to aim for the fastest thing he could think of half awake to do it, possibly with a side of revenge.

That was why, a minute later, he was in the hallway in bare feet with his jeans and shirt pulled in, rigging a small noise bomb - the kind that would be intended for distractions, diversions, and false alarms - to Lance’s door on a short timer.

He walked carefully back to the door of the hallway their rooms were on, counting down under his breath. 

He’d forgotten how loud the little things were the unholy shriek could probably be heard a couple floors up and down, and going by the commotion of yelling, he’d gotten everyone’s attention. Shiro was in his door with an ominous violet glow before the short burst even faded out; by the time his scan of the hallway for threats had noticed the noisemaker on Lance’s door and swung to Keith at the end of the hallway, Keith had his hands in the air with an apologetic grin that had no guilt whatsoever.

The violet glow flickered out with a descending hum. Shiro gestured sharply at Lance’s door in utter frustration. _What the fuck, Keith?_

Pidge’s door opened a crack, with the green glow of her bayard visible behind the door. Hunk’s door opened, Hunk blearily staring down the hallway in confusion.

Lance tore into the hallway, immediately focusing on Keith. “KEITH I AM GOING TO KILL YOU.”

Keith took off out the door at a sprint. He could hear Lance after him. 

The chase through the lower hallways was short lived. Keith was doing everything he could to keep as much distance between himself and Lance’s angry mix of Spanish and English with a few Altaean swear words and one or two Galra thrown in for good measure as he could, but Shiro was faster than either of them gave credit for and much better at planning intercept routes as a reflex. He caught Keith on ambush from a side hallway, the prosthetic hand closing around the back of Keith’s shirt to pull him off his feet backwards with an ungainly “URK”.

Shiro kept Keith lifted off the ground, the metal arm quietly humming to maintain the hold, and ducked a different direction. Keith knew better than to do more than stay put like a scruffed kitten.

Lance got clothes lined at the chest with Shiro’s good arm, a short flailing scramble that turned into one of his arms twisted behind his back as Shiro marched them both toward the small lounge.

Keith was dropped on one side of the couch with a warning glare that he didn’t test. Lance was pushed on the other side, sinking in sullenly with his arms folded and his own glare at Keith. Keith was not surprised to see Hunk and a Pidge filter in, Pidge in an oversized salvaged nightshirt and Hunk half dressed in an equally scavenged bathrobe or housecoat of some kind. He had not expected Allura and Coran to be right behind them, with more consternation than any of the humans.

Shiro stayed standing in the middle, arms folded.

“Okay. No murder and no fighting, alright?”

Keith leaned back against the couch with a shrug. Lance grumbled something venomous and unintelligible that got Shiro briefly staring at the ceiling.

“Keith.” Shiro settled on starting with him, but had a few moments of fumbling for a question. “What the quiznak even?” He gestured behind him at Lance.

“He was thinking too loud.”

“I WAS ASLEEP.”

Allura and Coran had odd pauses of dawning understanding. 

“Okay, so you were dreaming too loud.”

“So?! It’s not like I was - for fuck’s sake that wasn’t even like, a nightmare or anything!”

Shiro stood in the middle, tiredly counting under his breath. 

“I think I’d have rather it was! I do _not_ want to know about your sex life, real or imagined!”

The counting turned to muttered syllables that Keith was pretty sure was a jumble of different prayers, some of them alien phrases he was pretty sure Shiro didn’t actually understand. Pidge and Hunk had taken the center of the couch, Pidge muttering something about popcorn. Coran sighed, leaning against the wall with his face in his hands, and Allura was stifling laughter.

For a brief moment, Lance recoiled back partway up the back of the couch, with an uncomfortable twitch. Then, he had his own moment of potentially regrettable ideas, sitting back down and draping his arms back over the couch, finding his smug ego mode. Shiro’s quiet jumble of broken prayers stopped with an exasperated warning look that Lance ignored.

“What, jealous that I _have_ one?”

Keith sputtered and snarled, puffing up and making strangling motions at Lance with hands twisted into claws. He wasn’t sure if he would have lunged or not if Shiro hadn’t been standing in the middle, already giving him a dead-tired and done with everything stare. 

Then Allura clapped her hands, grinning. “It’s so good to see you two starting to trust each other!”

The argument died, both of them stalling out to stare at her slack-jawed in unison. Shiro mouthed ‘thank you’.

Allura leaned on the couch. “You couldn’t share dreams if either of you were too guarded against the other - it could only happen if Lance had enough trust to relax any reflexive barriers, and Keith enough to not block it out.” She motioned between the two of them, only seeming more amused by their growing looks of horror at her and each other. “This argument wouldn’t be happening if you two weren’t starting to get along _far_ better than you’re willing to admit.”

There was a mostly silent pause, save for a very quiet “I really need popcorn for this” from Pidge. 

“I don’t want to see that much of the inside of his head.” Keith gestured helplessly at Lance.

“Well, that’s the reality of being Paladins. And if that’s the worst of your conflicts adjusting, you’re all doing pretty well, really.” Coran had folded his arms, still leaning against the wall, tiredly chiding. 

Keith wilted. He didn’t like the implications of how much was potentially leaking. 

Pidge leaned forward, elbows resting on her knees, clearing her throats for attention. “I hate to point out the elephant in the room, guys, but - is this really the first time this sort of thing has happened to everyone? Not counting your stunt on the Balmera, Keith.”

There was silence, and varying degrees of uncomfortable and awkward faces among the Paladins.

“Look. I haven’t gotten anything big, but I know I’ve had stuff in my dreams that wasn’t mine. Don’t get me wrong, seeing Hawaii and Miami was kinda nice! And foot long centipedes are usually nightmare fuel so one being a minor annoyance was kind of a nice change…and if that was yours, you do a damn good impression of a secretary bird.” Pidge motioned to Keith; she wasn’t wrong - stomp-kicking out belligerent centipedes or larger hostile insects with heavy boots was a skill he’d gotten used to in the shack. “Shiro…I didn’t actually want to know what you meant about food running away, but that was probably not that bad in perspective.” Shiro shrank a little, looking away. She leaned back, slinging an arm up over the back of the couch behind Hunk. “I guess the point is, if I’m getting bits, then we’re probably all getting it, and I don’t think pretending it’s not there is working.”

Shiro glanced at Lance and Keith to check that the argument was dead, then sat down heavily between Pidge and Keith. 

“Is there a way we can at least - filter it?” He motioned between himself, Lance, and Keith, looking to Allura and Coran. “I’d rather not inflict my nightmares on everyone, and not having any choice in what you’re sharing isn’t a great way to build trust.” 

Keith leaned back, pretending to half-doze. He was pretty sure the last part was more for his benefit than Shiro’s, and Shiro was far better at phrasing it to not sound sketchy. 

“The lions may be able to help you with some things, but if you block too much, you’ll weaken yourself and everyone else.” Allura slipped to the end of the couch across from Shiro; Lance was beginning to nod a little himself, but froze a little realizing she’d taken the end on his side of it. 

“She’s right, you know. Your strength as Voltron is limited by your bonds with your lions _and_ your bonds with each other; being in the habit of holding things back among each other could cost you”, Coran said wearily.

“I know, and we’re working on that - but forcing it before people are ready and things like this-“ Shiro gestured between Lance and Keith. “Just seems like it’ll build resistance worse than letting people set a few boundaries.” 

Allura frowned, rubbing her temple with one hand. “It might, but we are dealing with a matter of life and death on a potentially short deadline. That might be something you all need to work on if we’re to win this.”

“Well… he may have a point, Princess.” 

She turned to look back at Coran, who had an odd tinge of worry to his tiredness; Coran tilted his head toward somewhere else in the castle, then back toward them, with an oddly grave expression. Allura was confused for a moment, then paused, schooling her expression with a nod, letting him continue.

“There are other beings in the universe with powers that might try to get into your heads, and you humans don’t seem to have much affinity for magic or psychic ability. You don’t want to _keep_ it between each other, but a little bit of practice in a safe environment might mean you’re better able to defend against something hostile - so working on a few things would be like a sparring match.”

“Just try to mind that these are your teammates, and you all need to trust each other and be able to coordinate.” 

“Sure thing, Princess.” Shiro looked to the others, with particularly pointed looks at Lance and Keith. “Right, guys?” 

Hunk and Pidge nodded.

“Yeah.” Keith didn’t bother breaking his feigned drowse.

“Sure thing.” Lance shot one last glower at Keith; Shiro sighed heavily. 

“Let’s just…get back to bed.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (there really is a pretty big difference between the original Day the Earth Stood Still and the remake, and Lance probably wouldn't have had as much luck with the remake.
> 
> Also for what it's worth, I'm basically interpreting Keith's sexuality as "CONFUSED VAGUELY FRUSTRATED SQUIGGLES AND ALARMED NOISES"; he does not have his shit together at all, he can't bluff or argue his way through it, so he's opting for his other method of dealing with situations that alarm and confuse him - avoiding and hiding from it.)


	8. Shall I think of honor as lies or lament its age and slow demise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith makes good on his word to show Allura the photos of the tomb, and tries to fish for answers about their predecessors, with more and less success than he realizes. Red is still trying to figure out how to communicate with the new squishy tiny mortal, and having clarity issues.
> 
> Also Coran makes his attempt at the sparring match, and Keith demonstrates the wrong way to ask a survivor like Shiro about something they might remember.

Keith mostly got back to sleep, although he woke up with something nagging him from the conversation.

‘ _If that’s the worst of your conflicts adjusting, you’re doing pretty well._ ’

It didn’t seem like there was exactly a long succession on Paladinhood. Nobody had said anything about Alfor inheriting, and Coran never framed ‘Previous Paladins’ as though there were another group he hadn’t known personally.

So there was nothing for comparison except their predecessors. 

What the Hell kind of fights had gone on within Alfor’s team? 

It nagged more with a string of little things. Coran sidestepping saying anything specific about their predecessors. Allura never saying anything specific. Kythylian pulling Coran aside, gesturing at them and Shiro in particular. 

He got dressed; it was probably almost a rational hour anyway. Pidge was right that he should be showing Allura some of what he’d found on Earth anyway, and maybe he could get more of a clue.

He took the tablet, and walked to Allura’s room, tapping on it; he didn’t really want to wake her up if she wasn’t already awake. 

There wasn’t a response from he room, but there was squeaking near his feet; the other smaller of the mice was just in front of the door.

“Is she awake? I needed to talk to her about something. It’s not urgent, and Plachu probably already said something about it.” 

It was far too easy to fall into talking to the mice and not getting self-conscious about it, but then, at least he knew the mice understood him and could come up with some kind of response, unlike some of the wildlife around the shack he’d talked to. 

The mouse nodded, and ran down the hallway a little, looking back to check that he was following. He half expected to be led to the kitchen, but after a couple turns it was clear that wasn’t the destination.

He stared blankly when the mouse stopped at the training deck; there was definitely metal on metal noise inside. 

He looked between the mouse and the door, pointing at the door. The mouse nodded. He shrugged and tapped the panel to go in.

Allura had light armor of her own and a metal staff, and didn’t seem to be having much trouble taking on one of the training drones.

He was pretty sure it was also around the highest level he was managing at the moment; two years in a desert with most of his initial training being martial-arts and show fighting had put him more behind than he liked. Plachu and the largest of the mice were sitting near the door, squeaking occasionally as if cheering. 

She didn’t seem to notice him staying by the doorway, and the mice didn’t seem to care. 

She finally dropped the drone, snapping part of the neck and putting the end of the staff into the chest. She did seem winded, but she was also just on the tail end of recovery from reviving a living planet, and that was more than enough for him to not realize he was staring in awe until he heard Plachu laughing at him.

Allura turned while he was trying to pull back his reaction, and had her own moment of startle, leaning on the staff. “Oh, I didn’t even see you there!”

Next to nobody would have guessed from her carriage there that she’d just finished slaughtering one of the training drones.

“I wasn’t. I mean, I just got here.” He gestured awkwardly at the door.

“Is everything alright? You all usually sleep longer than this.” ‘You’re up early’ was a meaningless phrase in space.

“What? I - I’m fine, just…”. He shifted his weight, rubbing the back of his head with one hand. “Did Plachu tell you about the tomb?”

It didn’t feel right to lead with a question when he was carrying photos of the tomb of someone she’d known, as much as whatever they were hiding was bothering him. 

She held the staff out and it shimmered, retracting down to a short rod in her hand. “…he did.” She sat down cross legged by the mice, motioning him to sit down next to her. The biggest of the mice held up one of the water pouches; she took it with a quiet “Thank you, Platt.”

He folded down beside her, arranging the tablet between them; keeping it easily visible meant being awkwardly close.

“It’s half a continent away from where we found Blue. There’s a lot of old myths where the people looking for signs of aliens can argue forever over if some divine being or another was really an alien or not, but… it stuck out at the time because the way the story was painted, it was pretty clearly a person, even if they did have things the people who painted it didn’t understand.” He fumbled with the tablet, finding the directory with his photos and videos from various “expeditions”; the tomb had its own folder, with sub folders by date. “Here’s what we found at first - there were four or five decoy caves with paintings. The tomb was hidden, kind of like where we found Blue.”

Allura leaned closer to get a better look; he’d pulled up the first photo of the paintings, with the figures of whatever long-extinct group had encountered the Warrior watching the ships come down; one lighter colored streak with four darker ones behind.

The next image was of an odd rounded shape that seemed to have an open head and large side pieces, one of which was twisted upward; the angular-armored “Warrior” figure was stepping out, with a few of the people coming closer.

“They came down pursued, and ran into one of the early human groups in the area. I think now they were probably trying to lead away from Blue.”

“That looks like one of our pods, but from the way they drew the wing, it was damaged badly.” She stared at it thoughtfully. “That might be why it took the Galra so long to check your planet again; with that pod, they probably assumed they’d been led entire solar systems away from the Lion, at the very least.” The pods couldn’t wormhole jump, but from what Coran had said, distance travel with them was possible, just a matter of time and determination - both of which the previous Paladins would have had plenty of.

The next image, the Warrior was motioning to the humans to stay in simply drawn tree cover; they were in cover themselves, with three large dark figures with clawed hands, jagged mouths, and yellow eyes prowling just past it.

And next, two of the dark figures were down with red smears, the warrior exiting scene pursued by the last, while the humans remained hidden. 

“Leading away from the local people, who wouldn’t be able to defend themselves against the Galra”, Allura observed sadly.

He swiped past, to the humans on an overlooking ridge. More of the dark figures were spread out hunting, peering around trees and rocks below. Allura gave a faint snort; the Paladin had decoyed and vanished once they were away from the humans.

And then there was a painting of three of the Galra around a human. One of them was holding the human off the ground, dangling by the wrist.

The next painting showed the Galra keeping an armed perimeter around a number of humans. 

“Just like they did on Arus”, she grumbled bitterly; using the locals as bait, knowing the Paladins wouldn't abandon the helpless.

The Paladin reappeared in the next painting, charging the Galra. After that, the Paladin and the humans were in the middle of a ring of dead Galra.

And then there was a taller, hulking armored reddish jagged-mouthed figure; the Paladin stood between them and the now-fleeing humans. 

“Zarkon”, Allura growled. He’d only seen the dictator in other people’s memories, but he could see the resemblance, even if Zarkon in these paintings still had yellow eyes - closer to Alfor’s memory than Shiro’s.

There was a second, robed and hooded dark figure behind the Paladin in the next painting; white streaks leaked from under the hood. Something dark and jagged flowed from the other figure’s hand, striking the Paladin as they almost seemed to charge onto Zarkon's weapon.

“Who or what is that?”

He looked over at Allura’s confused alarm; she’d recoiled from the image with a hand over her mouth.

“I’ve never seen one of the Galra mystics do something like that.”

He shrugged. “I think-”

He stopped, suddenly more awkward. She gave him a narrow, suspicious stare.

“I - uh. I slept on one of the Balmera’s crystals and saw one of Shiro’s memories. There was someone like that behind Zarkon.” He shrugged. “That’s all I know. They were hanging pretty close to him and Shiro couldn’t hear whatever they said.”

She nodded, frowning grimly at the painting. 

The next painting was divided into two. One above showed a human hiding behind greenery while Zarkon and the hooded figure boarded a darker rounded crudely-drawn ship. The one below was the humans crowded around the dying Paladin, who was bleeding red and black smears.

“That’s repeated in all of the decoy caves.” He backed out of that trip’s folder. Allura didn’t move, staring distantly at the screen. 

Plachu had probably shared how they found the tomb, and the mice had climbed up to be sitting on Allura; he moved to the folder where they found the tomb, skipping the video he’d taken getting in.

There was a partly-carved cairn in the tomb; most of the designs were either abstract or worn away, but there were snarling feline faces and clawed paws. It got a faint, sad smile. 

“A lot of what was in the tomb had signs of water damage - there was a waterfall hiding the entrance. I think there used to be more paintings, but…”. He had several photos of indistinct smudges that had part of a figure here or there.

And then there was one on the back wall, furthest from any risk of water damage.

Five colored figures stood at the bottom. The black one in the center was taller and broader than the others. 

Above them were five large colored lions, in a circle across the wall. They looked more like oddly colored standard live big cats than the paintings around Blue’s caves, which were more accurate to the Lion. The black one at the top had red and white bird wings, the white faded against the stone. 

In the center of the lions was an indistinct, heavily stylized humanoid shape; a beam of white came from one hand in what he now realized was an approximation of a sword, while a long white shape hovered by the other hand, their attempt at a shield. White bird wings spread from the figure’s back. It was much like the other paintings on that wall; the best attempt made by a group of people that only had indistinct stories of something they'd never seen. 

Allura gave a faint, sad smile. 

“You have no idea how many crazy theories came up trying to figure that out. I… never shared the tomb itself with the communities trying to research alien stuff, just a few people that would respect it that I thought might know something. I didn’t want people to go looking for it.” He knew too many people who would think the chance to study an alien corpse was more important than respecting a burial site, although creepy autopsy and dissection culture in alien conspiracy circles was not something he wanted to go into with Allura. It’d given him enough nightmares growing up, and he suspected she might murder them if they thought about going near the bones of her friends and family.

Not that he’d blame her; he’d honestly probably help.

“Even the less crazy of us couldn’t make heads or tails of it. We came up with everything from alien gods and religion to the tribe synthesizing their gods with alien stories, to wondering if winged people in mythology in general were aliens.”

She laughed weakly; she had a hand around one side of the tablet, almost staring through the screen.

He nudged it over and let go, letting her pull it into her lap. She occasionally swiped between the photos of the tomb, mostly going between the cairn and the wall mural of Voltron.

She looked up from the tablet, sad, distant, and looking more lost and vulnerable than he’d ever caught more than glimpses of. “If we get to Earth and have the time… could you take me here?”

“Yeah. It wouldn’t be hard to get to.” Not with the lions and the armor thrusters. 

“Thank you.” She lightly ghosted her fingers over the photo of the cairn, without enough pressure to register on the screen.

“Princess…what happened?” He motioned at the tablet. “How did the last Paladins go from one of the greatest powers in the universe to scattered and hunted in hiding?”

She looked up, and even though she made eye contact, she seemed to be looking through him as much as at him, with something darker creeping into her expression. Platt squeaked something, and only got a small head shake.

She spoke carefully, as if the words were fragile. “Altea was once closely allied with the Galra; my father considered Zarkon a close friend.” She drew in a slow breath. “So when he betrayed us, he was in the perfect position to ambush with none the wiser. He tried to take Voltron for himself, to use as a weapon of conquest. After the initial blow Zarkon had dealt, my father was afraid he could not keep him from claiming it, particularly since they had already lost the Black Paladin and his bayard… so Alfor commanded the others to scatter, and hid the lions… and Coran and I.”

So Alfor hadn’t been the Black Paladin, and Zarkon had apparently overcome Voltron by taking out Shiro’s predecessor away from the lion in ambush. Red was oddly and almost uncomfortably silent in the back of his mind, a pensive, wary flicker.

“He - the record of him stored in the castle - said that he regretted it, now, That I had been right when I tried to argue to find another Black Paladin and fight.”

“So we’re the vulnerable parts.” He looked down at his own hands; no matter what, they really were tiny and fragile next to the lions that depended on them.

She nodded soberly, handing the tablet back; Platt followed into his lap when he took it, so that she could curl up, drawing her knees to her chest. “The lions can recover from horrifying amounts of damage; if Zarkon can get rid of all of you, they’re rendered powerless.”

He frowned. “How would he claim it, though? I thought the bonds couldn’t be forced, and they don’t seem to like him. Even if he could, he couldn’t control all of them at once, right?”

Red rumbled in his head, cautious and still oddly wary. 

She closed her eyes, rubbing her temples. “I don’t know. I suspect that - witch in the paintings might be the key to both his immortality and why he thinks he can take them all by force.”

It wasn’t a very clear answer, but for once he didn’t think she had a much better idea than he did. He did pin down what felt off about Red.

The lion was uneasy with the subject. 

Something was going on that actually had Red _afraid_ ; it wasn’t an immediate threat, but it was there, some invisible Sword of Damocles hanging over them. He had no idea what could make something like Red that uneasy, but he definitely didn’t want to find out the hard way.

The training bay opened to Coran with the fourth mouse running in ahead of him. For once, Allura was the one giving one of the mice the Filthy Traitor glare, which somehow made Keith feel better about his adversarial relationship with Plachu. 

“There you are Princess!” Coran gave her a long, suspicious look; she stared up innocently and pointed at Keith. 

Coran did not buy it. “I don’t know if you should be pushing yourself that hard yet.” 

The feigned innocence soured into a sullen glare. “Coran, I’m fine. I am also grown and every bit as much a part of this crew as everyone else on board.” 

Coran folded his arms, tapping his foot skeptically. “Neither of you have eaten yet, have you.” 

Keith looked away. Coran raised an eyebrow at Allura, who had all of the mice also looking at her.

She sighed, standing, and Keith followed after Coran shot him an expectant warning look.

Coran at least wasn’t trying any experiments on him today. The normal “someone somehow found a way to screw up seaweed” goo at least had some taste to it, unlike the bland soy burger crap Coran seemed to ambush him with randomly when he was alone and losing track of time.

He was getting terrifyingly used to both of them, and prayed for a chance to get supplies off some habitable planet.

“Allura?”

They both started.

“Are you sure you’re alright? You seem distracted.”

She looked across the table at Keith. He turned the tablet back on to the image of the cairn, sliding it the short distance across the table to Coran.

“His ancestors built a tomb for one of the Paladins, who died fighting the Galra there. They used the natives as bait.”

Coran stared distantly at the picture; it was one of the rare times he let the weight of everything be visible. He’d also apparently picked up navigating that type of touchscreen somewhere, flicking through a few of the photos pensively.

“Do you know whose it was?”, Keith asked quietly; he wasn’t sure how much of an answer there would be, but he’d feel better with a name to put to it rather than nebulous titles.

“Not the Black Paladin”, he started in dark sarcasm, then shook his head.

Keith was beginning to wonder what Zarkon had done to Shiro’s predecessor to leave no corpse and destroy the bayard. Red didn’t seem to think Coran’s comment was very funny.

“The artwork you showed me didn’t provide many clues, I’m afraid. It depends on how long after the lions were hidden this occurred, and how well they planned for misleading Zarkon”, Allura added.

He nodded. It could have been Blue’s failing to get clear of the system fast enough, or deciding to just settle on Earth and not expecting pursuit; it could have been one of the others later playing decoy, who may not have even known they were close to one of the lions. 

The table stayed subdued and quiet until Coran left to go back to his repairs; Keith finally hit awkward and restless not long after and wandered off to explore the castle.

Red was still restless and uneasy; he stopped in a hallway, leaning against the wall to focus on it with a query.

Something was still missing that was important. He needed to know what happened to the Black Paladin.

“Okay…”, he muttered, waiting for an explanation.

Betrayal, death, starfields, Zarkon somewhere in the endless void, hunting.

“I am not sure what you’re trying to say.” None of it actually felt like anything new or that he didn’t already know.

There was a redoubled attempt, enough to almost give him vertigo expecting gravity to vanish, but it was the same set of images.

“…this isn’t working.” 

There was a moment of frustration, then Red settled on Shiro. Shiro was a target, Shiro would be in danger, he needed to be ready to cover Shiro.

 

“You don’t have to tell me twice.” It was what he did anyway, and if something had Red worried enough to insist he do more of it, then he was going to do more of it.

 

********************************************

There wasn’t much to do in space between point A and point B, especially on a ship where you could only follow any written language on a hazy technicality. He was wandering aimlessly around the Castle exploring after that.

 

He was not expecting, after he’d gotten halfway to lost, to have Coran pop up obviously looking for him. 

“There you are! I was wondering if you were still up for that sparring match.” 

He blinked; it wasn’t that he had a problem with it, but… “Weren’t you busy with repairs still?”

“Ah - well, yes. I reached a bit of an impasse, you see, and thought I’d step away for a bit to clear my head.” Coran shrugged sheepishly. “Pidge and Hunk are still at it in other parts of the ship.” 

“Well, I’m not doing anything.” There wasn’t much for him to be doing anyway. 

They ran into, and ended up acquiring an audience in, Shiro and Allura on the way to the training deck; Keith didn’t manage to catch whatever conversation had been going on, but they both seemed to be in good spirits, and they both probably needed more time that wasn’t taken up by battles and reminders of what they’d lost. They headed for the control room to watch from out of the way.

Keith felt more self-conscious about Allura watching than Shiro; Shiro in the audience was something normal, even if it’d been WMA bouts, summer Renfaire tourney fights and jousts back then, with no life-or-death overtones anywhere. 

Coran pulled a couple of devices that looked vaguely similar in build to the dormant bayards out of a panel in the wall, fiddling with something in the sides of both of them before tossing one to Keith. 

It activated on pressure, generating a blade that was oriented similar to his bayard, but seemed to be made of something transparent, like a hologram of a blade; Coran’s had a similar activation. Coran waved to Allura, and there was a faint hum as a flicker went through the walls that didn’t seem to do anything. 

“Practice blades! Not entirely fun to get hit with, but they won’t leave any harm, and the training bay has a sparring mode that will keep holographic tally marks for blows.” Coran raised his sword in an angled salute; Keith returned it as best he could, and Coran dropped into a narrow stance with the blade forward. 

Keith charged first; he was still adjusting his previous training to both live combat and the difference between a European longsword and the Altaean bayard’s perpendicular blade, and he knew part of his survival so far had been ambush and speed, getting fights over with too fast for an enemy to exploit openings or mis-steps. 

Coran was definitely expecting it, sidestepping with a swipe at his back that he wheeled out of the way of; there was a focus and intensity the Altaean normally played off and downplayed. 

Coran had field-military training and experience on him, but was also getting older and slower - he caught the frustration behind Coran’s focus every time there was a glancing hit or near-miss he should’ve been able to dodge, every half-beat of delay on a slash or lunge that gave Keith a chance to shift out of the way. As Coran had warned, the practice blade did sting and leave an uncomfortable tingling for a while after.

Keith was winning, slowly, more pale red streaks of light painted over Coran than there were light blue over him, but he got the feeling that it would’ve gone the other way if Coran had been younger. 

Then, the gravity turned off, and what should have been a sideways dodge sent him halfway across the room into midair. 

Coran also ended up a little off the ground, but had reacted faster to the change, turning to look up at the control booth. “Really, Allura?” 

She was laughing, but held up both hands empty shaking her head; Coran and Keith both shifted the look to Shiro, who shrugged, also holding his hands up in a gesture of ignorance.

Coran sighed. “One more thing to fix… but just as well, eh? Change things up a bit?”

Keith shrugged; he was a little far away from any solid surface to do much, but if Coran was willing to try and keep going in zero-g, he’d make an attempt.

Coran grinned, and it was another glimpse of what he must’ve been when he was younger. He pushed off the ground with one foot, angled into a lunge at Keith, who was suddenly left trying to figure out a deflect with no footing whatsoever.

What had been an even fight turned into a massacre; Keith was fumbling to adapt training dependent on things like balance and stable stances to a complete lack of solid surfaces and an utterly different set of laws of momentum where every contact with anything changed trajectories, while Coran…

Well, of course the race that had been in space for possibly thousands of years would’ve developed martial arts adapted to zero-g. Keith was starting to feel like one of the penguins getting thrown around in videos of orcas playing with their food, or a pinball in a three-dimensional table. 

He was mercifully close to the ground when gravity abruptly restored, although he was also in the middle of getting bounced off a wall, which resulted in him dropping the four feet down in a graceless heap; Coran’s landing went off with an awkward whoop as well, but Coran had been in a better position to make a landing. 

He raised a hand awkwardly, turning off the training blade, before he even bothered detangling his own limbs. “Yield! Yield!”

Coran turned his own blade off, stretching and shaking the ankle he’d landed on with a small wince before walking over to offer Keith a hand up; he was back to smiling easily and loose posture. 

Keith took it, straightening out and taking a couple moments to regain his balance fully. Coran was in good spirits, but seemed oddly confused, almost concerned.

“Didn’t they train you for zero gravity at your Garrison?” 

“Not for combat.” He tested one of his shoulders in a circle; there was probably a good bruise on his back from hitting the walls. And floor. And ceiling a few times. “We’re barely getting into our own solar system and haven’t had official first contact, remember?” 

Coran nodded slowly in dawning understanding, a lopsided grin spreading. “Aaaaaah - you really are such charming little fledglings, to’ve not even had to think about that yet.” 

Keith hunched his shoulders, almost glowering back, but there was a worrying point there. He folded his arms, looking away at the ground.

“Can you teach me?”

He’d rather his pride take a beating than end up dead or with someone else dead because he’d only ever learned combat piloting in zero-g, and really, learning how to fight in conditions Earth never trained for from hyper-advanced aliens might mean feeling woefully behind, but was probably more of an opportunity than a blow. 

He _was_ badly behind, and he didn’t intend to stay that way. 

“Of course!” Coran clapped hands on his shoulders happily.

Then, the lights and gravity went out; this time there was mirrored confusion in the control room, as it had extended there.

Coran’s grin turned sheepish. “But I may have to delegate that to Allura for a while, at least until my repairs are done.”

Navigating into the hallway was at least easier than fighting as they met Shiro and Allura halfway; the gravity restored a couple seconds later, mercifully in the narrower hallway with less opportunity for awkward drops. 

When Coran pulled Allura aside, Keith heard mention of ‘the others probably need it as well’, and saw Shiro smiling nervously and shaking his head. Allura seemed horrified, and her affronted ‘well of course that must be addressed!’ sent a shiver down his spine as he remembered her previous ideas of ‘training’.

Shiro manufactured an excuse to be elsewhere, and Keith decided he had to help with ‘checking the upper floors’; they both fled before Allura could get any ideas. The stare of disbelief that followed them telegraphed loud and clear that she knew what they were doing and was not impressed, but she didn’t try to chase them down, at least.

They didn’t slow down until they were a few floors up and away, either, with meant being pretty well and truly lost. It wasn’t too worrying - Keith at least had learned that it was always possible to use Red like a compass to follow, heading in the direction of the hangar until he saw something familiar again. 

“Did you ever wonder how the crew and visitors found their way around here back in the day?” He tapped the wall idly as they walked.

Shiro shrugged. “There’s probably directories of some kind; they’re just in Altaean.” 

“Yeah, but the computer access set into the walls seems pretty spread out. You’d think a ship like this would have - I dunno, labels on doors or ‘quarters’ with arrows on the walls or something.” 

Shiro paused, staring at the walls; everything was pretty identical. “Well, crew could probably just ask directions and learn it pretty well; this was a fortress, so I don’t imagine it’d get that many unattended guests.”

“No, they had -” He stopped; Shiro was giving him an odd, curious look of confusion. “Look, not all those weird dreams I had were from everyone now. They actually had diplomatic affairs and some kind of parties or something here.” And the brief bit he’d gotten hadn’t given him a great view. “I’ve been wondering if there might be labels, we just can’t see them.” 

Shiro gave the intersection of hallway ahead a speculative look. It was a blank wall. “In something outside of human visual range or something?” 

“That’s my guess.”

Shiro made a noncommital, uncertain noise. “If language barriers were a problem, it’d probably be easier to just have the computer send directions to whatever devices people had on them.” 

Either way made as much sense as the other; Keith shrugged, and they went back to wandering aimlessly. "...Hey, Shiro?" He ducked forward, catching the wrist of the mechanical arm; Shiro stopped, looking back at him.

"Do you remember some of what I'd been investigating - the pictures I'd shown you before of the one tomb?"

Shiro drew in a breath slowly, holding it, closing his eyes uncomfortably. "I'm...not sure. Maybe?"

"Do you remember the one figure in the story that appeared out of nowhere at the end?"

Shiro shook his head, distantly apologetic.

So his memory was still scrambled. Keith shuffled through his pockets, but the tablet was back in his room; he settled for his phone, flicking through what he had on it for the photo of the panel with the Paladin's death, and held it up to Shiro. "It - looks like someone who was with Zarkon in one of your memories."

Keith was vaguely apologetic about that; he knew Shiro didn't like his nightmares and worse memories leaking on the others.

Somewhere in between the identifier and the image, Shiro went pale and stiffened.

"Do you know anything about them?" It was a rhetorical question, but one he almost hated to ask, particularly with how rattled Shiro already looked. 

Shiro grimaced, closing his eyes and raising his good hand. "I. Yes." 

The mechanical hand twitched, a couple of faint arcs of light from the inside, and Shiro shifted weight to put it behind him, away from Keith. 

They had something to do with the hand. For once, he was pretty sure it wasn't a good idea to try and touch the mechanical hand even if Shiro was well aware of him; he reached up, tugging on Shiro's good wrist. "Shiro - what happened?" 

Shiro took a step back, slipping his hand free, and leaned against the wall heavily. "I don't - remember well, still. I'm not sure. I don't know." He scrubbed his face with his hands, forgetting the mechanical one for the moment; the war between trying to cover it to be the stable one for everyone else and being terrified of the nebulous person was visible. Keith was pretty sure he was lying about not remembering it, but was feeling horrible for bringing it up now; he shoved his phone back in its case in one of the belt pouches.

"It's okay. It's not something we need to know right now, okay?" He tugged gently on Shiro's shoulder, above where the metal arm was attached.

"No it isn't." Shiro shifted weight, folding his arms in a thinly veiled attempt to keep most of the mechanical hand out of reach; he'd been getting less self-conscious about it, before this. "This shouldn't get to me like this." Shiro's attempt at sounding collected failed utterly; his voice was shaking, even with the frustration.

"You went through Hell, and it wasn't that long ago." He was worried, and still not sure what he could even do about it now.

"It's still over." 

Keith stared at him. "Shiro, nobody's called me 'werewolf' since I was twelve, but if Lance did it tomorrow, you'd probably have to pull me off of him." 

"That's different. You were a kid then, you couldn't really defend yourself." 

The stare went more dull and tiredly exasperated. Shiro hadn't been there for any of that, and had apparently tuned out a good part of the stories. "That was the _opposite_ of what kept getting me in trouble, Shiro. In fact, I'm pretty sure I could defend myself better as a kid against the assholes that nearly tried to kill me than you could against Zarkon and - whatever that was." 

Shiro tried to stifle a flinch, looking away sullenly at the other wall, face set in a stubborn scowl.

"And what happened to me was nothing compared to what you went through." 

Shiro opened his mouth, almost turning to argue, but there wasn't really a way to say it that wouldn't either sound absurd or be making Keith's point, which only made the stubborn, frustrated sulk worse. 

"We're not going anywhere near any of them anytime soon anyway. It's not that important." Whatever was going on, that other figure wasn't a matter of life or death, and trying to get some extra clues wasn't worth hurting Shiro more. 

"Maybe not soon, but we still need to do it. We - _I_ \- need to be able to fight them." 

"Shiro..." Keith sighed, edging as close as Shiro would let him get on the bad side. "Look, forget I said anything. It's safe and we've got a break for once, alright? just... breathe and let's try walking again, see if we can find something." 

That seemed to be a suggestion Shiro accepted, although it took a few good sections of winding hallway for him to lapse out of a tense stalk.

It faded into tired, and Keith had an easier time keeping pace next to Shiro and staying close. For a while, it almost seemed like the darker mood lightened a little, the maze of hallways with nothing actually threatening in them serving as a distraction.

Then Shiro was falling quieter, and it was the kind of lost in thought that was worrying. 

“…I was thinking.” 

At least Keith wasn’t going to need to interrupt whatever it was, and Shiro was saying something. “Yeah?”

“We’re still flailing blind out here. The unclassified transmissions the castle’s picked up don’t tell us much specific, and all of our real tactical information is ten thousand years out of date.” 

He nodded, waiting for Shiro to continue; Shiro was chewing on something more productive than being frustrated with himself, and while Keith was unsure it was a better direction, he really couldn't talk about throwing himself at Something To Do when something was bothering him. 

“We need intel. We can’t just roam aimlessly and hope we find something useful.”

“So…we try to ambush a Galra warship and copy their computers or something?”

Shiro started to say something, then paused. “…That might be an option. We can’t tell the ships that’d have something useful from the ones that’re patrolling for pirates or something, though.” 

Shiro had a point; randomly raiding Galra ships wouldn’t be that effective. “Do you have a better idea?”

Shiro went grim. “We’ve got the commander for this entire sector - someone that’d answered to Zarkon directly.”

“I don’t think he’s going to answer anything from us. There’s not really anything we can threaten him with that’d be worse than what Zarkon would do to him if he talked, we don’t have anything to bribe him with and he’d probably just knife us in the back if we did, and I don’t think he’s going to have a change of heart.” Sendak was a zealot, absolutely dedicated to his cause, and it had taken four of them to take him down. “I don’t think waking him up to ask is even a good idea.”

“We may not have to.”

He wasn’t sure if that was an encouraging thought, or if he should be worrying more.


	9. Do you got room for one more troubled soul?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crystal Venom trampled everyone's nerves. 
> 
> A floundering attempt at fussing over Allura, Pidge diverting a potential fight between Keith and Lance, and Shiro's nightmares bleeding all over everyone.

He almost felt guilty for not immediately dragging Lance to look for Shiro after rescuing him from the airlock, but he could feel Red roll her eyes a little. This was bad, yes Shiro was in danger, no this was not what Red was afraid of even though it was not anything good.

While Coran, Pidge, and Hunk had all turned their attention to working on the castle, the less repair-inclined were in the lounge as “the room least likely to malfunction”, all in varying degrees of “too much on edge and a little too much just happened to sleep”. The room was mostly silent for a while; Shiro was trying not to look like he was staring off into space, Keith had edged over a foot away on the couch trying not to look like he was hovering, Allura was sitting in the middle, and Lance was hanging upside down off the couch, occasionally checking if anyone would notice if he slid closer but intent enough on avoiding letting on that he really didn’t want to be alone in the castle right now that the rattle from it was setting Keith more on edge. 

And with Sendak no longer where they could verify _anything_ , Keith considered that one more thing to worry about. “Are you sure the cryopod was broken? Because I think we should look for it, just in case.”

Allura sighed heavily, leaning forward on her knees with a hard stare at the door. “While a sense of mercy is important for a paladin, Keith, I think in this instance we aren’t violating any codes by letting the void take him.”

“Mercy? I want to make sure the bastard’s dead so I never have to worry about him ever again.” He glanced sideways at Shiro on that one; Shiro had actually checked back in mentally enough to catch the conversation, and was finding a spot on the wall fascinating. It was another moment of a loud enough emotional rattle to be noticeable, if one caught between ‘PLEASE MAKE SURE HE’S DEAD’ and some kind of messy, squiggly ‘I don’t want to be a monster should I want him dead is that bad’ snarl. 

Allura raised an eyebrow, shaking her head, but didn’t argue this time. 

The first time they’d taken Sendak down, once he was unconscious, there had been a brief moment where Pidge had volunteered to make sure he stayed down, an idea Keith had supported. Shiro had recoiled from the idea of killing someone unconscious and defenseless, looking almost queasy; Allura had only briefly considered before voting with Shiro against it, citing it being against a Paladin’s honor. Keith hadn’t argued, but it was more out of respect for Shiro’s sanity at the time than thinking it was a good idea to keep Sendak alive on the Castle. 

Lance didn’t bother righting himself on the couch. “…You know, I actually agree with Keith for once. Sendak would pull bad slasher movie bullshit.”

“It was cracked and parts of it were crumbling when I hit the button. There were holes in the - glass or whatever.” Shiro stared down at his prosthetic hand, flexing the hands, perplexed and a little afraid of it. 

“Galra can’t survive decompression can they?” Lance squinted sideways at Allura.

“No. No, they cannot, not without some kind of aid or buffer like anyone else. And Sendak was not altered in any manner that would allow for it.” She paused, then pulled up a light-screen on something small on her wrist; Keith couldn’t read it but would bet she was double checking.

Lance actually twisted a little to watch, waiting.

“He isn’t. We’re rid of him.” She dismissed it, leaning back and sprawling against the couch. The other three were dealing with the Galra crystal and the repairs; they had little to do now but wait.

Shiro let out a tense breath in relief, but didn’t really seem to relax much for it. 

Keith stared at him, eyes narrowed. Shiro had a near compulsive need to hide as much as he could of something bothering him whenever the others were around. If he tried to poke over how badly Sendak had obviously rattled him, Shiro would flatten into pretending he was fine harder. He _might_ be able to get Shiro to hold still if it were just Allura, but that would mean getting Lance to leave.

Lance was downright panicky about being alone in the castle right now, but wouldn’t admit it; Keith didn’t need to be in the cockpit for it to be loud and clear over the relay, even with it muted outside of the Lions. Not only would it take a fight that would make Shiro’s nerves _worse_ , but Keith also wasn’t that much of a heartless bastard, especially not when Lance had just had a second near-death experience in a very short span of time. 

He might be able to talk Shiro into going somewhere else, but that would mean leaving Lance and Allura alone with Allura grieving, rattled, and nerve-frayed, and Lance in full “must hide weakness and no sleep to have what little passed for a brain to mouth filter”, which might get Lance actually dead. 

He had absolutely no clue how to calm Lance down. He was also still on edge himself, enough that anything making a sudden move would probably risk having his bayard thrown at it. 

Which was why the bayard was deactivated and set a couple feet out of reach behind Shiro, where he’d have to lunge to grab it; that way, if anything did startle him, he’d have enough time to process what - or who - it was before he did damage. Usually being this on edge would mean burning energy on the drones in the training bay, but that was off the table until Coran and Pidge had checked the programming to make sure it wouldn’t try to kill him again. 

Also walking back into a room that had just tried to kill him seemed more likely to make the nerves worse.

He was also getting the sinking feeling, between Allura’s pensive stare-into-space, Shiro’s occasional half-jump and glancing off at minor noises off in the castle, and Lance bonelessly oozing around to sprawl across the other side of the couch, that he might be the most together person in the room. 

“Hey…Princess?” Lance at least sounded like he was being careful. “Are you alright?”

Allura half-startled. “…I’m fine. Really.” She gave Lance’s skeptical look a wry smile.

Keith looked between her and Shiro pointedly and irritably. It was familiar and he saw Shiro glance sideways, process, and actually focus on the far wall as if intently staring at it might mean nobody would notice.

“I dunno, it’s been a rough…few…”. Lance counted on his fingers. “Weeks for us, and it’s been worse longer for you, and I know I kinda feel like shit.” Lance flopped back, draping a hand over his face, sprawled over the couch; for once he wasn’t bothering trying to cover it with fake bravado. Keith noticed that Lance was watching from under his arm still, mostly between Shiro and Allura.

 

He was starting to get a clue what Lance was doing. 

“It has been pretty rough”, Shiro admitted tiredly.

“That’s not going to change much until we’ve won.” She folded her hands together, shoulders stiffening. “Complaining about it won’t do anyone any good.”

“Well, it’s not like we’re wasting time right now. The Castle needs repairs anyway.” Keith leaned back, draping his arms across the back of the couch. “And acting like everything’s fine doesn’t make it go away, either.” He shot Shiro a pointed, sharp look; Shiro found a different spot on the wall, jaw set sullenly.

“I’m _fine_.” Allura stood up suddenly. “We have the entire universe against us, Zarkon waiting to take advantage of any vulnerability he can, and we cannot afford to let comparatively small blows like this push us back.”

Plachu’s head popped up over the back of the couch, nose twitching as he stared up at Allura. 

“Princess, that’s not-” Keith was gesturing helplessly between Allura and Shiro as she turned and stormed out. Plachu chased after.

Lance sat up, alarmed and worried. Platt jumped on Shiro’s shoulder, tugging on his hair, waving after Allura, and squeaking frantically. The other two popped up, running to the door and staring back pointedly. 

Keith grabbed Shiro’s wrist to tug him along with as he got up, his bayard forgotten by the couch; he didn’t really need to, Shiro was already moving, and Lance proved impressively fast at getting to his feet and going. 

“Good going, Keith”, Lance growled as they followed the two mice.

Shiro caught Lance’s sleeve, stepping in between them before Keith could react. “I don’t think that was Keith’s fault.” His attention was otherwise fixed on the mice, who’d stopped at an intersection briefly chattering between themselves before turning left and darting off, barely checking to make sure the three Paladins were following. 

Allura had managed to get impressively far across the castle and down in a very short amount of time; if not for the mice helping, they might never have managed to find where she’d gotten to. They knew they’d found the right door finally when Plachu was sitting in front of one at the end of a hallway, tapping his foot impatiently. 

The room was large, round, and dark; in the center was a raised pedestal with a shattered cylinder and broken metal. Allura was in back, behind it, curled up so that her hair was barely visible from the entrance. She’d frozen when the door opened; Plachu ran in with the other two, Platt trailing behind as he had to jump down from Shiro’s shoulder.

“Oh, it’s just you”, she sighed, as the door closed behind the three Paladins. The mice were pretty quickly all over her, Platt in her lap; there was a lot of squeaking. “I know that, but I can’t just -“ The green one sounded almost warning in the interjection. “Ugh, if only it worked like that.” Platt made a very indignant noise and some other string of chatter off of it. “You know I can’t do that. I have to _lead_ , what message would that send?” 

Shiro held up a hand to the other two to stay put by the door; he got halfway across the room being impressively quiet before he stopped just short of the pedestal in the middle of the room. “Princess?”

She stiffened, standing up and wheeling around; at first it was almost panicked, and then she spotted the other two behind Shiro and it turned to outrage. Keith realized that in his earlier attempt at estimating who’d talk around who, he’d missed a few more “this would work but not this” problems with Allura.

“ _What are you all doing here_?!”

Keith and Lance flattened against the wall on either side of the door. 

Shiro didn’t move. “We were worried about you, and so were they.” He motioned to the mice all over her shoulders and head, all four of whom stared at Allura pointedly in unison.

“Ugh, you are all traitors”, she grumbled. 

“Listen-“

“I am _fine_.” She turned her back, sitting back down on the other side of the pedestal. 

Shiro sighed. “No, you aren’t”, he said gently. “You’ve lost pretty much everything, the universe is a mess, and you’re suddenly needing to lead, which means everybody’s looking up to you and you’re trying to live up to it.”

Keith had a quiet moment of staring at Shiro’s back in grouchy concern; he wasn’t going to forget this or the sense that Shiro was recognizing part of Allura’s problem from his own experience the next time Shiro insisted he was fine. Allura tensed, not moving from behind the pedestal or answering.

Shiro shook his head, turning back to the other two. “Could you…?” He jerked his head toward the door.

Keith nodded, and tapped the panel to open it, waving to Lance. Lance stopped in the doorway, opening his mouth and turning back, then just nodded to Shiro and followed.

The door closed behind them, and Lance was following after him, hands shoved in jacket pockets. They got a decent way down the hallway before Lance finally couldn’t sit on his grumble any longer. “You ever wish they’d just _talk_ to us?” 

 

“They’re both trying to be in charge. They think we might get more afraid of everything if we see them upset.” Keith didn’t like it any more than Lance, even if he had figured out what they were apparently _both_ doing to themselves. “They’re too busy trying to be what they think the rest of us need to take care of themselves, and don’t want to admit we notice.” 

It was a complaint he’d been sitting on for a while; he had a little bit of luck with Shiro out of prior familiarity, but even Shiro was prone to the “I’m fine” “No really I’m okay” bullshit. 

“…You think he actually thinks we think he’s fine?” Lance stared at the back of his head incredulously. “I mean, I don’t know if anybody else could’ve gone through all of that and come out the other side as together as he’s _been_ , but he’s… kind of …” Lance was making vague hand gestures searching for words. 

“A mess sometimes?” Keith looked over his shoulder. “Call him on it one of these days. He’ll argue, trust me, I know.” He looked back forward down the hallway, hunching his shoulders, hands wrapped around his belt. 

He was creepingly aware that he was getting stared at; Lance’s eyes were narrowed like there was some kind of puzzle he was fighting with putting the pieces together on. “Why _do_ you hover around him so much?”

Keith stopped for a moment, staring back over his shoulder. “What do you think?”

“I dunno. I mean, you’re the one who always has to be better than everyone else, right?” 

He glared back, half wanting to shake Lance until the stupid fell out, but it wasn’t worth the effort right now. “Whatever.” He went back to heading elsewhere, stalking down the hallway half hoping he could outpace Lance. 

“Don’t you just-“

“Relax, Lance, they knew each other before Kerberos.” Pidge’s voice suddenly came from one of the walls; Keith froze, turning on one heel to stare at the wall panel, and Lance had almost missed a step staring at it in his attempt at chasing Keith down.

Lance was the one closest to the suddenly speaking section of wall. “Pidge?! What are you doing?!”

A light-screen appeared hovering in front of the small panel; Pidge was in one of the upper hallways, upside down with the gravity off. “I was debugging the internal communications programming and needed to test it out.” She looked behind herself. “And Coran’s working on stabilizing the gravity generators, so they’re all offline on the upper floors.” 

 

Keith walked back, leaning in behind Lance awkwardly where he’d be visible to Pidge. Lance was pointing between Pidge and Keith in confusion.

“What? We were both at the launch, even if we didn’t really meet, and I think Keith was the one from a few of Matt’s stories from the Garrison. You _were_ the one switching Shiro’s coffee for decaf so he’d sleep more while Matt kept him from going back to their rooms, right?” 

Keith nodded dumbly. Lance was now pointing between Pidge, Keith, and back the direction they’d come from. 

“And the other person Shiro grumbled about ‘bullying him’ into doing formal volunteer tutoring with set hours so he’d have time to do his own homework around other people asking him for help?” 

Keith nodded again. 

“You know, I think you were the friend of Shiro’s Matt joked about kidnapping for the holidays sometime, unless Shiro was collecting weird antisocial loners that lived by themselves in the desert when they weren’t on campus.” Pidge seemed inordinately happy with this.

“Gee, thanks”, Keith grumbled at the description. 

“It’s just funny to think about how close a lot of us were to knowing each other before that crash. Anyway, it looks like the internal comm software’s clean, so I’m going to get onto checking the data backups. Later!”

The light screen vanished, Lance still seemed thrown entirely off balance. “You were switching his coffee for decaf?”

“He would go three days sometimes without sleeping!” Keith stepped back, hands out in a sharp defensive ‘what was I supposed to do’ gesture. 

“…You mean he’s always been like that?”

“Kind of, yeah? Shiro just…doesn’t think about himself.” Keith shrugged. The trauma was new, and Shiro had learned some pragmatism from the ordeal, but the lack of regard for his own health and safety and the tendency to put everyone else’s needs and wants ahead of his own had always been there. Shiro had a habit back then of trying to adopt strays to look out for, too, and after he’d managed to somehow get past Keith’s avoidance and occasional snapping, he’d always seemed confused when Keith turned it around and started aggressively trying to return the favor. 

Lance stared at him for a long time as if he’d just sprouted tentacles or part of his face had melted off, confused and vaguely lost and alarmed. Then, Lance stuffed his hands back in his pockets, shifting weight back. “I’m…gonna go find Hunk.”

Lance walked off, and Keith pondered if he should worry or not; the end conclusion was probably yes, but he had no idea what just happened and Hunk would be a better person to deal with it anyway. 

 

**************

When he finally got to sleep, his dreams were an unpleasant jumble. Something about diving into alien visitation theories as a twelve year old who’d just figured out they might not be entirely human had left some dumb marks that never went away; knowing most of the alien autopsy videos were hoaxes didn’t stop the childhood beginning of vivid vivisection nightmares. 

He did have a bleary realization when he briefly woke up from those, only barely conscious long enough to connect the dots, that his dumb ‘we found an alien clearly the answer is to inflict horrible experiments on it’ nightmares usually included clean white walls and familiar hospital settings, not darker metal paneling, gleaming yellow eyes, and a large bank of lights. 

For a while there was a bleeding, hazy mess of nightmares where it was hard to fish anything specific out of the jumble of images and dread. Eventually the haze drunken-lurched into the darkened Castle, the dim violet light of the Galra crystal, and charging Sendak; Pidge was somewhere thrown to the side not moving, Lance was more alarmingly ashen, Shiro was struggling with the restraints, and there was no sign of Allura.

It didn’t last long; the claws seemed to shear through his armor too easily, and as he was thrown aside with his bayard clattering away turning off, he heard Sendak snarl, “What did you think would happen?”

Everything went back to haze; there were six-eyed beaked white masks in the darkness, yellow eyes, and glimpses of Zarkon, violet-eyed, a little too vividly present and looming, along with a few different garbled dreams of dying and seeing the others dying, usually against a backdrop of some kind of Galra ship or base, sometimes with Zarkon himself present and the active agent - and a couple of times with Shiro turning on them, violet-eyed and acting empty of any familiar personality.

It apparently hit some kind of critical mass, and Keith found himself draped halfway out of his bed, the blanket tangled, staring at the floor in the dark. He really hoped some of that had just been a slurry oozed together by having too many people connected dealing with some of the same horrors, but really, there was only one of them that had that much direct experience, had been experimented on by the Galra, and had been around Zarkon at all.

He wasn’t surprised to hear quiet, cautious footsteps in the hallway outside, or the muffled sounds of some of the other doors opening. He couldn’t really hear if anything was said. When his door opened, he sat up blearily, “Shiro?” out of his mouth on old reflex before he’d even actually gotten a look to confirm who was in the door. 

“Sorry to wake you.” Shiro shifted weight awkwardly. “You alright?”

“’M fine.” The brief flicker of a guilty flinch from Shiro was probably a clue why Shiro was up and wandering. 

“I was having a hard time sleeping, so I figured I’d check up on everybody.” Shiro rubbed the back of his neck. 

“You were having nightmares.” Keith stared up tiredly, and Shiro flinched, shifting weight.

“Did you…?”

“You’re not allowed to guilt trip over it.” Keith glared at him. 

Shiro made an awkward noise. “I don’t think it works that way.” 

“Look, you didn’t _ask_ to go through any of that. Nightmares happen. You’re not allowed to blame yourself for what they did to you.” Keith kept up the glare. Shiro leaned on the wall, arms folded and stubbornly not looking at him. 

The door opened again, startling Shiro. Hunk looked barely conscious himself, blearily scanning the room for Shiro by the door. He shoved a pillow in Shiro’s face and a blanket, shoved him further into the room, gave Shiro a pointed look, and then walked out grumbling tiredly as the door shut. Shiro stood staring at the door for a good few minutes, blinking in confusion; Keith sighed - Hunk was probably right that ‘not being alone in the room’ would mean better odds of Shiro either sleeping or maybe having less vivid nightmares.

“You can have the bed.” Keith oozed off to rifle through one of the panels in the wall for spare bedding. 

Shiro snapped out of staring after Hunk, straight into protest. “I am not kicking you out of your bed! I have my own room!”

“Are you going to sleep if you go back to it?” Keith glared at him pointedly.

“Yes!” Shiro hunched his shoulders sullenly as the glare continued, Keith raising an eyebrow. “…No.”

Keith went back to digging out spare bedding. 

“Look, I’ve slept enough tonight. I’m fine.” Shiro turned to walk out, and Keith growled at him, too tired for much else. Shiro stopped, staring back at him.

“We went through this back in the Garrison. You actually _do_ need to sleep.” He closed the panel with a few extra thicker blankets. “If having someone else in the room keeps the nightmares down, we’ll _all_ sleep easier. And I think if you start having nightmares again or are up moving around for too long, Hunk will probably come back in and pin us both.” 

Shiro almost protested, but Keith was probably right about Hunk at this point. “Well, I’m not kicking you out of your bed.” 

“You’re not sleeping on the floor.” 

“Neither are you.” 

Keith stopped, walking resolutely around Shiro to stand between him and the door while Shiro watched him suspiciously. 

Then, he put all his weight into shoving Shiro at the bed. 

He half succeeded, mostly on surprise and shoving Shiro off balance; it turned into an awkward squabble as Shiro tried to get loose and he tried to ensure Shiro stayed on the bed, with a lot of thumping against walls, the floor, and grumbled complaints both ways. Shiro ended up succeeding, detangling Keith’s attempts at emulating an octopus and depositing him on the bed. 

Keith glared down as Shiro was arranging the pillow and blankets Hunk had shoved at him, then slid off the bed, making his own nest of bedding on the floor nearby.

Shiro gave him a long, tired stare, sighed, and gave up.

Keith woke up much later to getting jostled a little. He growl-grumbled, curling in closer and wadding more into blanket, not quite awake enough to recognize that he was curled around Shiro’s mechanical arm. Shiro tried to tug it loose again, getting another growl and a tired attempt at gnawing on the metal guard over the elbow. 

“Keith…” 

He finally resigned to consciousness; Shiro was trying to halfway sit up, but not having much luck with his right hand pinned. 

Keith didn’t particularly care. 

“Come on. It’s not a good idea to sleep on that.” Shiro made another attempt at tugging his arm loose. 

He made a quiet irritable noise. There wasn’t any kind of emergency, the castle was probably still in need of repair work, it’d been a shitty-sleep night, and he had no reason to be in a hurry to get moving. 

And it wasn’t dangerous unless Shiro felt threatened, which was incredibly unlikely. 

“…Can I have that arm back? I’d like to get up.”

Keith yawned, still not moving, considering it. He was about as warm and comfortable as you could get on the floor. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.” Shiro ruffled Keith’s hair with his good hand, and then started gently peeling Keith off the mechanical arm. Keith finally let go, sitting up with his blanket over his shoulders. 

Shiro flexed the fingers, testing the arm out pensively.

“It’s not like it comes off.” Keith was pretty sure that if it did, Shiro would go without a hand when they weren’t going into combat.

Shiro sighed heavily. “It doesn’t. They connected everything into it. I think it’d even bleed if something mangled it enough.” He was flexing each of the fingers in turn.

“So you’ve got a sense of touch and everything?”

“Yeah. You were chewing on it off and on all last night in your sleep.” He shot Keith a weary look of exasperation. 

Keith found his blanket hem fascinating. 

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to sleep on it like that.”

“It doesn’t turn on unless you’re in a fight or feeling pretty threatened, and you shut it off on reflex fast.” He was a little tired to try for another demonstration, and Shiro’s nerves didn’t deal well with those, but he’d already proven that. 

“And if I do have another nightmare?” 

Keith almost conceded the point, until something occurred to him. “Have you ever wrecked part of your bed in your room?”

Shiro paused awkwardly. “No?”

“Then it doesn’t turn on in your sleep.”

Shiro shook his head, standing up and stretching. Keith spoke up when he was halfway to the door.

“You’re not a monster.” 

Shiro flinched, and turned around to say something. He only managed a few awkward hand gestures and a shrug before going out the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For what it's worth, I don't have plans of going ship-directions with this, unless close platonic relationships count, in which case this is eventually going to be a multidirectional mess. I'm basically running with Keith being enough of an isolated little ball of "too used to being alone" that he'd probably cling to ANYBODY nearby if he were asleep around them; Shiro's the one person he's comfortable with enough right now to solidly fall asleep around, because trust issues and being a socially awkward mess. 
> 
> (One day he's going to doze off around Pidge and she's going to get to fend off getting hugged like a plushie.)
> 
> I'm also interpreting Shiro's arm as closer to a pretty thorough cybernetic alteration than a straight-up prosthetic, since as near as we can tell from canon, it DOESN'T seem to come off, which would take a lot of REALLY involved work that we aren't even close to figuring out yet.


	10. The only battle's in the back of your mind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's very little to do in space when waiting on repairs besides deal with a bunch of people stuck in a confined space together. Shiro gets a break, and Lance and Keith find out the maze was rigged.
> 
> The intended lesson doesn't really sink in very well at their current level of communication skills with each other - aka "so low it's somewhere subterranean".

There wasn’t much to do for a few days as the repairs continued. The castle’s self-repair mechanisms were amazing, but it had also been taking a pretty severe beating repeatedly, and that meant some need for maintenance on top of the Galra crystal’s corruption throwing everything out of whack. They’d found a nice uninhabited system to drop the crystal into the local star; Keith had grumbled about it being too bad they couldn’t have launched Sendak with it, which got an agreeing nod from Pidge and Allura and Shiro not arguing. 

Pidge returned to helping with debugging the castle’s computers, Hunk walked off blearily to go back to helping with repairs and maintenance. Lance followed Hunk. 

Shiro idly wished for a chess board or something; that turned into an early morning distraction, as Allura found a few old Altaean equivalents and some less ancient versions of strategy games. Keith curled up next to Shiro’s console for a while watching Allura walk Shiro through them. Allura had an odd moment of visibly debating if she should say something about Keith foregoing any actual place to sit to take the floor by Shiro, but glanced between them, apparently registered both of them acting like it was normal, and went on as if nothing happened; Keith did end up with a couple of the mice curled up on him.

It was comforting and weirdly familiar; settling in to be part of the background while Shiro Actually Got Along With People, a return to normalcy that seemed like it’d never happen again after Kerberos. It was a little surreal to actually have more to do with the other person than “One of Shiro’s Friends”; he was still unsure how to bring up to Pidge that he did remember being _around_ Matt, but that he hadn’t really interacted beyond being Shiro’s shadow. There hadn’t been any planning for things like Matt keeping Shiro from catching him switching the coffee, Matt had just paid enough attention to catch on and pick up helping from the sidelines, or been on the same wavelength enough for it to overlap whether they paid attention to each other or not.

The change in scenery didn’t really matter all that much; if anything, he was more comfortable on the Castle than he’d ever been in the Garrison. He half-dozed, content to sit with the mice and the new version of the old familiar background noise. 

It felt like having a home.

He didn’t look when the door to the bridge opened after a couple of hours. He was aware that Lance had come into the bridge, but was choosing to ignore that for the time being. 

Pidge and Hunk trailed in not long after, with Coran in tow.

Allura looked up from the game, Shiro turning in his seat to look over himself.

“Are the repairs complete?” 

Keith almost hoped the answer to Allura’s question was ‘no’; as much as he knew he’d get restless after too much more of this, the quiet was starting to not be so bad of a break. All of their nerves could probably use it.

“Not quite, but at this point, there’s not much to do but check up on the self-repairs now and then.” Coran shrugged. “Those won’t be done with their work for a few quintents.”

Allura gave a faint groan, leaning on the arm of her chair. “That’s a little longer than we should be sitting around.”

“Well, if you want the Castle in good fighting shape the next time it’s needed, it’s a necessity now and then. Push anything too hard without some care and it’ll break down when you need it.” 

There was something pointed in the way Coran paused at the end of it, with a brief glance around the room. Lance was sprawled over his console, Pidge was sprawled on the floor with her chin on folded arms idly working on something on her laptop, and Hunk was sitting in his chair, sunken down in it. 

“I know, it’s just…there’s so much we need to do.” She stared distantly down at the game board.

Shiro frowned at the board, idly fidgeting with one of his holographic pieces. “That just means we’re all in this for the long haul. It’s too much to do all at once, and if we try to rush it, we risk losing everything.”

“I suppose you have a point.” It felt like there should have been more to that, but she wasn’t saying it. 

“We should also take what breaks we can - we don’t know when we’ll have time to rest, and everybody will be better for it when the next fight comes.” He motioned behind him at everyone else; Allura followed the gesture with a tired expression, some argument that she was starting to give up on but hadn’t quite let go of yet. 

“Yanno…” Lance shifted to start going through pockets in his jacket. “I think I do have a bunch of Star Trek on here, if we’ve got nothing to do for a few days.” He held up a keychain that had a handful of small thumb drives hanging off of it. “Pidge, you can get these on the big monitors even with the computer still a little goofy, right?”

Shiro turned in his seat, staring at the keychain dumbfounded and oddly lost looking. He looked down at Pidge, and actually looked afraid to ask. 

Pidge raised an eyebrow at Shiro, distracted from Lance. “…Yeah, pretty easily…”

Allura stared at Shiro in confusion, and then down at Keith, who was visibly happy with Lance for once. Keith’s familiarity with the old series was entirely Shiro’s fault, over the course of random downtime in the Garrison and a few times Shiro’d gone out to check on him and fuss over him living alone. Before Kerberos, Shiro had a love for the more optimistic sci-fi; where Keith had been chasing the stars to try and find himself and get away from a world he never quite felt like he belonged to, Shiro was chasing dreams of helping build something better.

It was a dream the Galra had done all they could to destroy, and Shiro had only had a couple days on Earth around anything familiar in Keith’s shack between escaping and getting whisked off to Arus. While the rest of them at least had random contents of pockets and things they’d normally keep on them, Shiro had basically nothing of his own - or much of anything familiar besides them.

And of course, being Shiro, he’d never said anything about it.

Lance seemed to be as caught off-guard as Pidge, but ‘doing something right’ seemed to process enough that he was smiling when he redoubled his focus on the keychain, going by colors of casing and markings to pick one out and hold it out to Pidge. 

Pidge shrugged, and took a few minutes setting it up.

There was the not entirely planned side effect of Shiro’s running commentary on context in history; what it meant at the time to have people from nations that were almost at each other's throats on the same crew, how much of what was written as a part of the society in the show was controversial and still a matter of argument when it was made - and sometimes for decades after. Allura seemed to be fascinated by it, even with quietly making fun of some of the more blatant nonsense, and had a near endless supply of questions. 

It was the longest Keith had seen Shiro go since the escape without anything else that had happened weighing in, without some signs of worrying or tensing up expecting something to happen; for a few hours, Shiro was almost back to his old, pre-Kerberos self, before he’d started carrying the weight of the universe. 

There had to be a break thanks to Pidge running into a computer glitch. Allura leaned around. “You said this was the oldest of this; how much is there?”

She got several odd laughs from most of them, Lance calling it “older than any of us”, and Shiro admitting “If he has _all_ of it we’d need a few months”. Keith wasn’t sure if she actually followed the time measurement, but she didn’t seem to be asking, although she also didn’t seem too thrown off by finding out it was one of the series that had just never really ended. 

Shiro was already flagging in his chair, wistfully distant, with a less-comfortable shift of the mechanical arm. “It’s one of the things I grew up on - the kind of future I wanted to be a part of.” 

“Maybe we can yet bring things back to it.” 

Shiro paused, turning to look at her quizzically; Lance was draped with his arms folded on the arm of his chair, chin resting on them, listening, while Pidge occasionally looked up from trying to deal with the glitch and Hunk was dozing. Coran had moved to his console to back Pidge up on finding the problem.

Allura smiled. “Well, things were never perfect, much like your Federation’s fictional galaxy - there have always been conflicts, wars, occasional petty strife and problems, but there was a time there was more peace than destruction.” 

Coran interrupted in the background. 

“Hello I think I found it- Pidge, do you see this?”

“Yeah, if you can keep the sections of code around that subroutine frozen for a minute I think I can get it.” 

Allura leaned around the chair to be better able to see Pidge. “You’ve learned to read Altaean well enough to work on the computer?”

Pidge laughed nervously. “Nooo…but computer code works differently from spoken and written language, so I rigged up something that would translate the symbols to functional equivalents I _could_ understand. It’s a little clunky sometimes, so Coran has to double-check my work still, but it hasn’t caused any horrible malfunctions so far?” Pidge grinned up at everyone sheepishly, turning back to her debugging.

With her and Coran both busy, the rest of them took a break, descending on the cafeteria. 

Hunk spent a long few minutes rummaging through storage rooms off the side, finally returning crestfallen. “We’re out of everything. Nothing left of the supplies from Arus or what the Balmerans sent us with.” 

Allura had tried to argue that the Balmerans needed their food stores more, and got almost half the population insisting they take something. 

“Is that really so bad though…” Lance had been considerably less okay with the Balmeran food after finding out what about half of it was.

Keith remained well past caring about what it was as long is it was edible; he was still carrying Platt, while the other mice had scattered to different people. “Oh come on, you’d eat lobster and those are basically ocean bugs.”

“Crustaceans”, Lance corrected sullenly.

“Same difference.”

Allura sighed. 

Hunk was dead-eying the dispenser suspiciously. “Are we sure this is fixed?”

“Systems we need to survive were the top priority.” She waved a hand, resting a chin on her hand. 

Shiro stood next to Hunk, staring at it, shrugged, and tried it, walking back to the table with a bowl and a lack of caring that it was back to bland seaweed-failure goo.

“Is this really what everyone lived off before?”, Hunk asked, tentatively taking Shiro’s success as a sign it was probably safe to get a bowl of his own. 

“Not normally. The castle used to have some crew, and we would make stops on allied worlds for supplies. The synthetics were more of an emergency measure or for longer trips where supplies weren’t available, or to help defray how much we needed.” Allura stood up, heading over to get her own.

“So we’re basically looking at the equivalent of MRE’s.”

Allura gave Keith a questioning look.

“Military rations. They’re usually packed and treated so they don’t take up much space and keep for half of forever.”

“And they’re mostly horrible”, Hunk added, making a face; the Garrison didn’t deal in them a lot, but there were occasional field survival exercises.

“…essentially, yes.” She did allow a weary look at her bowl for that. 

Shiro shrugged. “It’s not that bad once you get used to it.”

Lance and Keith both almost said something and mutually thought better of it; at this point, as much as Shiro had complaints of his own, neither of them really wanted to call him on possibly not counting after the previous two years when he’d had a day with fewer reminders. Instead, Keith got up, barely headed off by Lance; he didn’t particularly care beyond a dim look at the competitive implication. Plachu peered down from Lance’s head. 

After a mostly quiet few minutes at the table, nobody particularly caring about mice pilfering, Hunk paused, poking the goo. 

“So is this all it can come up with?”

“There are a few other synthetics, but most of them aren’t working as of the last I’d heard, and some are meant for different species.” Allura was calm about it, but weary enough to guess that they weren’t the only ones it was wearing on.

“I know Coran’s been messing with it. He keeps using me as a guinea pig.” Keith wrinkled his nose.

“Wait, you mean you’ve gotten something out of here besides the green goo?” Hunk almost looked distressed.

“Coran’s probably using him to test because he’ll eat anything.” Lance jabbed his spoon Keith’s direction. 

Keith shrugged. “You’re not missing anything, unless unflavored soy mash sounds better to you than this.” He tipped his bowl up to show, getting a small squeak of protest from Platt leaning over the edge. 

Hunk grimaced.

Allura seemed briefly confused, but shrugged, not asking. “I wouldn’t recommend messing with it yourselves unless you can read Altaean - some of what’s working might be toxic to us.” 

They heard Coran and Pidge coming a little before they entered the room. “-was going over the training bay code, I noticed something funny with the Invisible Maze, but it didn’t show signs of corruption, so I meant to ask you about it.” 

They came in the door, Coran listening with a questioning noise; Keith and Lance’s heads shot up, listening suspiciously. 

“It’s set to randomly throw unwinnable rounds where the maze displayed in the control room isn’t the maze used in the deck - is it supposed to do that?”

“Yes. It is meant as a trust exercise, after-”

“IT WHAT?!”, came in unison from both sides of the table.

Coran looked between Keith and Lance; the expression of betrayed outrage was similar, although Keith’s had more anger to it. 

“It’s a trust exercise, and one you both set a new all time record for failing. Ideally, the Paladins involved are cooperating enough to realize something is wrong with the maze itself, rather than blaming each other.” Coran made sure to give both of them a very pointed look. 

“Why didn’t you tell us?!” Keith made a few sharp hand gestures at Coran.

“Because it doesn’t work as well when there’s _warning_ ; you’re supposed to figure it out on your own.” 

Allura was trying not to laugh behind her hands; Shiro just sighed tiredly. Plachu laughed quietly on top of Lance’s head.

Lance turned to gape at Keith. “Wait, does this mean you _weren’t_ just running me into walls?!”

“No?” Keith held his hands up indignantly, Platt claiming the rest of his bowl. “Why would I?!”

“To make me look like an idiot?” Lance gestured as though it should be obvious.

Keith’s indignant agitation stilled some, but didn’t fade. “You don’t need my help for that.”

“At least I make things look better than you.” Lance folded his arms, glowering sourly. Hunk nodded from Lance’s side of the table.

Coran cleared his throat, glaring at both of them. Pidge had folded her arms next to him, eyebrow raised, and Shiro was already lapsing into a long-suffering thousand yard stare.

Keith made a frustrated noise; he wasn’t even sure what Lance seemed to expect, but Lance apparently existed in a different version of reality. “Look, we’re dealing with life and death out here, and that’s our only practice - why would I screw with you in training when it could get any of us killed in the field?!”

“Because it’s a training thing, it’s like a big video game! It’s not like it’ll actually impact anything.” Lance made a few agitated hand gestures, throwing his hands up. 

“Is that why you kept crashing the simulator?”, Pidge added.

“Not funny, Pidge.” Lance shot her a glare.

“But it does? Those ‘training things’ are the only chance we get to make sure we’re ready to survive when we’re out there getting shot at.” Keith motioned off the direction of the training bay in irritation and frustrated awe; Lance did damn well for someone who apparently was blowing off chunks of their training as ‘not that important’, and might be terrifying if he actually focused for a change. Lance was pointedly not listening, and Shiro buried his face in his good hand. “Are you saying you _would’ve_ run me into walls in there?” He fixed Lance with a wary stare.

Lance opened his mouth, then seemed to think about what he was about to say and shrank into his seat, looking away guiltily. “…maybe.”

Keith sank back in his chair, glaring; knowing that Lance had just been managing to be a decent human being to everyone else made - Lance was fine with doing things and being helpful for anyone else, Lance was even perfectly good backup in the field, but the second they weren’t under fire it was open season at him. He knew he wasn't innocent either, but he didn't think he was being _that_ antagonistic. 

Keith was not particularly paying attention to a short unspoken exchange - Coran raised an eyebrow, tilting his head at Shiro. Shiro leaned back, holding both hands in the air open. Allura made a motion waving to go ahead.

Pidge took two large steps to the side away from Coran and went to get food.

“Alright you two, suit up.”

Lance and Keith stiffened, both turning to stare at Coran. Hunk winced, edging his chair away.

“You lot are a _team_ whose very survival is dependent upon your ability to _trust_ one another, and you two can’t directly interact for five doboshes without ending up at each other’s throat. I am taking you to the training deck until you get this out of your system!”

Keith let out a breath, hunched his shoulders, and stood up, hands around his belt, to follow Coran. Lance looked over to Shiro and Allura helplessly; Shiro had his arms folded and a stern expression that gave no room for argument, shaking his head, and Allura just raised an eyebrow.

Lance slid out of his chair to slink after. They could just hear Allura asking Pidge how the directory of some of the Altaean media had fared.

They were quiet until they got into the hallway, well out of earshot of anyone else. “You’re not going to throw us in there to spar, right? Because I’m pretty sure he’s going to murder me.” 

Keith wouldn’t argue that in a figurative sense; Lance wasn’t good for more than dodging at close range, and the training deck didn’t have enough space for him to get and keep enough range to even try to shoot back. 

“Worse. I’m going to make you stay there until you cooperate”, Coran said; he was having to think to fish out the moments he’d seen Coran near that grim and stern. 

“We’ve been okay on missions.” Lance was protesting, backpedaling in defense.

“Yeah. It doesn’t happen when we’re under fire”, Keith had to grant, even if he was still grouchy about ‘all other times’. 

“A lot of people are capable of cooperating when their lives are on the line. It’s called survival instinct.” Coran glared back over his shoulder at them. “Now I don’t know what’s gone between you, but if you’re going to be paladins, this feud needs to be nipped early. The last thing we need is another ‘nothing’ festering until it turns into something awful.”

Keith stopped in the hallway, Lance missing a step to avoid running into him. “Another?” Coran stopped, tensing. “What the Hell kind of fights did the previous Paladins have?”

Coran turned enough to look back at them, calculating. “If you two can go at least six quintents without any kind of squabble - no fighting, no put-downs, no snide remarks or sniping - then I’ll consider telling you.” 

Keith glared back at him sullenly; Coran had definitely framed it as a challenge, almost mocking, as if he didn’t expect them to be able to do it.

And, at the rate they were going, he was probably right.

Coran turned to continue on; Keith followed, Lance dragging behind. 

The rest of the trip to the armory and then to the training deck was silent. Coran stayed with them until they were both in the deck in the middle of the room, then stalked up to the control room above.

“Alright, get your shields out. I’m going to run a variation on the defense drill. The drones are set to spread out and aim for your backs, so your only defense is going to be each other. Let’s see how long you can last.” At least he wasn’t starting them on the invisible maze; Keith would probably have ended up trying to carve through a wall to get away if Coran had gone for that, especially after the exchange over the table.

There were only four of the little aerial drones, but they were varying altitude and angle more than when they’d done the group exercise, firing fast enough that it took a few minutes to fall into enough of a drill to afford any distraction. They weren’t speeding up; he was a little wary, unsure of Coran was leaving them set on a steady pace intentionally or not. The Altaean seemed to just be watching in the control center, hands folded in front of his face.

Coran adjusted something, and it actually seemed like the rate of fire slowed down a little. Keith didn’t trust it, but there wasn’t any change in the drone’s movements; they seemed to have lulled just enough to make the drill too easy. 

He wasn’t sure what this was supposed to prove; he took it seriously, and Lance for once was actually paying attention to it, as if somewhere between his flagging at the table and Coran’s baiting his competitive streak had finally been aimed somewhere a little useful. What glimpses he could catch out of the corner of the eye did get enough sullen sulk out of Lance’s body language to call the entire thing into question even if they did pass. 

He should stay focused on the exercise, but it was starting to make him restless, and if he wasn’t mistaken, the rate of fire actually turned _down_ again, just an occasional shot to keep them on their toes.

If any part of the trial Coran was fishing for was “focus on the trial and not on other things bothering”, Keith knew he was about to monumentally fail, but he was stuck in a room with Lance and it was bothering him.

“What is your problem, anyway? We’re in the middle of a war. That’s not something to treat like a _game_.” One of the drones on Keith’s side tried to go high, easily blocked when it fired at Lance. 

“So what, I’m supposed to just worry about it twenty-four-seven and forget how to lighten up like you?” He heard a low charging hum behind him and closer to the ground, then the zot of the shot hitting Lance’s shield. 

“I am not worrying about it twenty four seven. I’m just being realistic instead of blowing everything off whenever there isn’t live fire.” Two shots from his drones, spaced out on either side, easily caught. 

“Are you kidding? If someone isn’t pulling you somewhere else, you just spend all your time in here or staring at the walls. I mean, you know what a ‘hobby’ is, right? One that _isn’t_ related to trying to kill something?” A couple charging sounds and zot-impacts behind him. “Or obsessing about aliens?”

He couldn’t quote WMA really - swordsmanship might not’ve been more than a martial art and curiosity back on Earth, but it was still martial arts. A lot of his life was wrapped up in trying to hunt down alien conspiracies to figure out his own past, then to figure out what had happened to Shiro. He had the Renfaires, at least before he’d Exited the Garrison and had to lie low, but he was pretty sure Lance would make fun of that. “Hey I knew Star Trek, you already know that.” One shot high to block, one to the side. 

“Uh-huh.” Lance sounded disbelieving. “Because of Shiro, right?” 

Lance apparently had noticed about where Keith had parked for the entirety of that, and which one of them was more blatantly enthusiastic about it. Keith grumbled something unintelligible while Lance caught a shot. 

“Have you even ever been on a date?” The mocking tone Lance took was grating on his nerves.

“What’s that even got to do with anything?!” Keith almost looked away from the drones, but he knew better after the group exercise; the drones would take advantage.

“Living a little? Trying to be something _other_ than a bad broody stock antihero?” A couple of zots off Lance’s shield behind him. “I mean, Christ, what were you like as a kid? Did you sulk at the table for family game night or something?”

For a moment, Keith saw red. His shield turned off, and he took one deceptively calm step sideways.

Lance heard the sound of the shield deactivating. “ - Keith?” He was starting to turn when both drones fired, hitting him in the back; the floor opened, dropping him down with a strangled noise.

Keith stayed stubbornly unmoving as all four drones circled around behind him; the feedback through the armor from taking four shots was like grabbing a live electrical wire before he was dropped through the floor.

He didn’t bother waiting for the feedback to entirely die down in the holding room at the bottom, ignoring Lance picking himself up and the indignant and confused “Keith, what the Hell?!” to stalk to the door on the way out. He didn’t make it more than half a step, Coran already in the doorway, expression a tangle of alarm, frustrated disappointment, and concern. 

“Coran.” He was speaking through clenched teeth that were half-bared in a snarl, fingers curved into claws; it was an act of will to not growl. “If he opens his mouth one more time in the same room with me, _I am going to hurt him._ ”

Coran opened his mouth, thinking for a moment, then stepped out of the way, staring after him as he stalked off.

He didn’t stop or look up until he’d made it to the hangar; Red bent down, jaws open for him to enter. Once in the cockpit he took his helmet off, throwing it back across the room to clang against the wall, and flopped out heavily across the pilot’s seat. The lion was quiet, the presence that filled the cockpit wrapped around thoughtfully; there was a mental nudge, like a wall of heat briefly pressed up against him.

He let out a breath with the growl he’d stifled earlier, the inhuman snarl surreal in the small space. “What the Hell is his _problem_?! I’ve never done anything to him, I barely knew he existed back in the Garrison!” The lion was watching him, considering, as the growl died back to his old reflexive stifle. “…Okay, so I’ve sniped at him some, but he started it, and it’s like every time he remembers I exist, he’s suddenly offended I’m breathing his air or something! He’s fine with everyone _else_ , and I know it’s not just him and Hunk knowing each other because Pidge said she did the obsessive thing at the Garrison too and he didn’t even _know_ Shiro before, he’s fine with all kinds of random aliens, he can even put a lid on it when we’re fighting, but apparently I only belong here when we’re getting shot at, and there’s no fucking _reason_! What the Hell did I _do_ to earn this bullshit? I can’t even talk to Pidge around him without him getting jealous!”

There was a quiet, purring rumble. The Castle and all of it was the first place he’d been that really felt like _home_ , the Lions and all the bonded team thing should’ve meant maybe people besides Shiro that he could maybe try to relax around. He knew he was hard to get along with, that he’d spent years either avoiding people or snapping something somewhere because he got uncomfortable that drove people off; usually he could figure out what he’d screwed up, before he’d hit mostly giving up on trying. 

And Lance seemed determined to keep him pushed to the edge outside of active combat whenever he reminded the other pilot he existed, whether he was being antagonistic or not. He sank down into the seat, the initial defensive anger finally starting to ebb out to just a sort of stinging weight.

Red was getting that odd sort of attention, as if sure that he should have a clue to the answer and waiting for him to figure it out; then one of the external display screens blinked on, showing Coran walking into the hangar. Coran looked up at the lion, and was definitely saying something, but Red wasn’t relaying it and he could guess what it was; Coran was looking for him.

“Oh no. Not happening. I’m not going out there.” He folded his arms, trying to mold himself into the chair.

Red moved, lowering her head. 

“Oh no you don’t - don’t you dare - I do _not_ need someone lecturing me right now, I came here to get _away_ from people damnit -“

The door to the cockpit opened.

“Apparently your lion has other ideas.” 

He groaned in the chair, shrinking into it. From the corner of his eye, he caught Coran looking down at the red helmet, shaking his head.

“I know. I threw the exercise and let him get hit when I was supposed to be covering him. I fucked up the entire thing.” He didn’t really regret it, even though he knew better, and knew how important the whole thing was; he went sullenly quiet, waiting for the lecture.

“I take it he hit quite a nerve there.” Coran was actually being carefully gentle about it, leaning on the back of the pilot’s seat. 

It was somehow more alarming and threatening than if he had been angry; he knew how to handle lectures, but there hadn’t been many people other than Shiro to be that calm after he’d had an outburst of some kind, and most of them, it was a temporary thing with another shoe to drop, or something that ended up turned around against him later. He draped an arm over his face. It wasn’t the most comfortable thing with the armor, but he didn’t entirely care right now. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Coran sighed. “I think I might’ve taken the wrong tack back there. After all, it’s not like you lot are veteran soldiers, or even knew each other that well before for the most part.”

“Something went wrong before and you’re trying to keep us from repeating it.” He was flatly resigned; it was a big part of where he should’ve known better than to let his temper get the better of him back there. “And we’re being idiots with lives at stake.” He was angry at Lance for Lance’s part in perpetuating it, but he wasn’t innocent, either, even if he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do to de-escalate the situation - he wasn’t going to play target without defending himself, and he wasn’t going to let Lance’s ego get overbearing, either.

The lion nudged him a little; he’d already had plenty of moments of staring at what was under that ego to know how fake it was. 

“Well, yes. This whole thing could turn dangerous for all of us very easily.” Coran paused, and Keith heard fingers tapping on the back of the pilot’s seat. “But Shiro was right, the other night - some things really can’t be forced, and you two seem to have a rather messy tangle going on without a clue which end is what.” 

Keith shifted his arm just enough to look over it with one eye, questioning. 

“I did ask him what he’d said right before you threw the exercise. He remembered it, and hadn’t the slightest idea why it made you that angry.” Coran half laughed, a brief, weak gesture. “I suppose it worked for a start on fumbling for where the real arguments are, at least.” 

“If you’ve got a clue on that, I’d love to hear it.” 

“Well. He did talk quite a bit about your history back at that Garrison you trained at. Sounds like you were quite the overachiever.” 

“I wanted off the planet. The only way to get there was to do well at the Garrison.” He shifted his shoulders in an awkward, badly-angled shrug, voice still muffled under his vambrace. “The way he acts, you’d think I spent all my time terrorizing him, but I barely knew he existed - I never did anything to him.” He finally shifted to uncover his face, sliding up a little in the chair, arms folded. 

Coran shifted to stand up a little straighter, holding up his hands. “I don’t doubt you on that - not anything with intent, and not anything you were the sort to be able to avoid.” 

He raised an eyebrow, giving Coran a very suspicious and dubious look. 

Coran gave a wry headshake. “Well, that was about all that he knew; what you did at the Garrison, how much you seemed to hate dealing with other people, and that you were top of the class and then just vanished one day. It’s a little hard to tell from where I sit how much was you and how much was you making a rather dubious legend of yourself.” He leaned his chin on one hand. “He doesn’t have the slightest clue what your family was like or why that upset you that badly; I told him he should maybe try asking, but he seems to think you’d rip his arm off.” Coran chuckled as if the idea were absurd.

“At the rate he’s going, I might.” He fixed his eyes on one of the consoles straight ahead of him.

“You know it’s obvious something’s wrong.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” 

Coran shifted. “…I _do_ have a clue - I didn’t want to resort to this, but you know, Allura and I _do_ talk.”

He curled in, sinking into the chair a little more; Plachu’s new name really was going to be Satan. 

“I know this probably sounds silly, but you know, it might be a _little_ easier to get along with him if you were a little less… secretive? I think he’d be a good bit less hostile if you made yourself more of a person and less of the Legendary Garrison Hotshot. You know, talk sometime. Get in some actual team bonding that isn’t lurking around the sides like an awkward freldriel or hiding behind Shiro when there’s too much people socializing.”

He didn’t have the slightest idea what Coran was comparing him to, but he could about guess the intent. “I can already tell you how it’d go. I’ll start to say something, he’ll start making fun of something he shouldn’t, and I’m going to either leave before I punch him, or punch him and then leave. That’s why I _don’t_.” 

“Wellll…maybe not by yourselves then? You seem comfortable with Shiro and Pidge, they might be able to help keep it a conversation long enough to get somewhere. Try saying something over the table one of these days when you’re catching a meal, so it’s not like you’re keeping a schedule or something. Less awkward.”

Keith stared up at Coran, as if his own existence should be enough point to explain why that wouldn’t work. 

Coran flagged, leaning more on the back of the chair, and resorted to sarcasm. “He’s not going to try to kill you and eat you, you know.” 

“That’d be easier to deal with. Look, the first time I saw him in all this, he got into one of his weird competitive fits and tried to shoo me away from _saving Shiro_. He’s fine when we’re in the field, he’s a good shot, he’s clever and good to have on the team, but I do not trust him to not push buttons and snipe at whatever nerve he can hit whenever he starts feeling too insecure or something. I am _not_ making a target of myself.” 

Coran opened his mouth, then closed it, leaning his chin on the chair. “Well, you’re not wrong about the insecurity. Just try not to be antagonistic and make it worse?”

“…I’ll try.” He wasn’t going to make any promises; it was hard _not_ to snipe back.

“Are you feeling fit to rejoin the rest of us, or should I give you more time?”

Keith wasn’t sure he felt like dealing with people at all, but he also knew he couldn’t hide in the Red Lion forever, and Red was nudging at him to go as well. He didn’t really answer, but he shifted to twist around standing; Coran smiled when he retrieved his helmet, and Red moved to let them out. 

They got to the bridge on the tail end of part of the Altaean saga Allura’d shown him and Lance the start of before. Lance was in his console out of armor, and still looked sullen and subdued; Hunk was leaning on the back of Lance’s chair, occasionally making comments trying to keep Lance more engaged. Pidge was on the ground sitting cross-legged, front and center with her back to all of them. Allura seemed aggressively determined to tune out Lance’s sulk. Shiro was mostly ignoring it, although he was making occasional glances over to check on Lance and back at the door; he seemed to relax a little in relief when Coran appeared, with Keith trailing behind. 

Coran patted his shoulder and nudged him off to his own console; Lance glanced up, expression darkening a little as he hunched in his chair. Hunk looked between the two of them and shook his head with an eyeroll, nudging Lance’s shoulder and trying to draw his attention back to the show. 

Allura was running things from a side console; as that segment trailed off, she stared down at the console distractedly, frowning, and then the screen blinked off.

“Ah - it looks like the next few files did get corrupted; it’s getting a little late anyway, and I’m sure I can find something else the next time we have this much time to kill.” 

Something was off about the way she said it, a little too smooth and controlled, but brittle. Coran looked faintly confused for a moment, then something odd crossed his face and he just nodded. “Yes, it probably is time for everyone to get some rest.”

“I can try and see if I can fix them?” Pidge turned around at the front of the room, already looking concerned.

“No, that’s quite alright. It’s not that great of a loss.” Allura was looking away, toward the back of the room.

Pidge went animated, waving at the laptop and where the screen had been. “It’s not a problem, really! You said this was a pretty big deal for you as a kid, right? And this might be the only copies left, so-“ 

“I said it’s fine.” The brittle had gone jagged, and the bridge went silent for a few moments, all attention on Allura. 

Shiro glanced around quickly, standing up. “It is pretty late, and you should get some rest too - we can worry about other things later.”

Pidge opened her mouth, narrowing her eyes at Allura in confusion, then adjusted her glasses and nodded. “…Alright. It’s not like the castle’s computers are going anywhere.” She folded up her laptop, picking it up.


	11. Like a prayer unto the dawn in arms against the shadows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pidge and Hunk end up contributing more to de-escalating Lance and Keith's feud than anyone else while Coran and Shiro are trying to figure out how to defuse it. 
> 
>  
> 
> And Keith and Hunk blunder into one of Shiro's more vivid nightmares. (ON WHICH NOTE I AM GOING TO TODDLE OFF TO ADJUST MY ARCHIVE WARNINGS.)

Keith was feeling raw on dealing with people after that; Plachu and one of the other mice decided to climb up to ride on his shoulders. Somehow they still managed to be Small Fuzzy Animals enough to not feel uncomfortable when he wanted to get away from people, despite knowing that they were just as intelligent as anyone else on ship and that anything that went on around them would be reported back to Allura. 

Pidge, Hunk, and Lance stayed on the bridge as everyone else filtered out; Allura had Platt and the last of the mice with her. Coran looked like he was intending to follow her, but somewhere ahead of Keith Shiro caught the older Altaean in the hallway with a quiet “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

Keith got curious, and tailed after, staying out of sight. They ducked into one of the smaller side sitting rooms, a couple hallways from the bridge. He crept up to the door; the hallway wasn’t on any straight path from the bridge, so there wasn’t much risk of being seen on that side, and if he sat against the door, he could just hear what was going on inside. Plachu made a small noise against his neck, but he wasn’t really interested in the mouse’s opinion of his eavesdropping right now.

“So how did it go earlier?” 

“Well…it could’ve gone worse, I suppose. I think I have a handle on what’s going wrong, at least, but not a clue how to solve it besides time and a little careful nudging.”

“I wish I could say that. I’m pretty sure I know Keith’s side of it, but I can’t get Lance to talk to me.” 

Coran half-laughed. “Of course you can’t. You were his hero back on Earth; he wants to impress you.” 

Shiro made a very tired noise. “That’s still weird to me. I hadn’t even graduated long enough to have flown that many missions, and I didn’t think I was doing anything that unusual.”

“You must’ve been doing well to have been one of the first of your species to the edge of your solar system.” There was that funny glowing affection in Coran’s voice; he still wasn’t over fussing about humans and their tiny baby steps into space.

“…Anyway, if you’ve gotten Lance to talk to you about whatever’s bothering him, you’re doing better than I’ve managed.” And there was Shiro deflecting away before he might be expected to actually respond to anything commenting on his own achievements. 

“What order do you want that in?”

Shiro sighed heavily. “Whatever order you want.”

“Well, of what he’s said so far, he’s homesick, he’s never been separated from his family like this before, he hadn’t finished his training, and he’s a little too used to getting measured against other people.” There was a pointed trail off.

Shiro groaned, then his voice muffled a little, probably through his good hand. “And Keith was top of the class.”

“Top of the class and left a dramatic impression that lingered after he disappeared on them. I don’t know enough of the actual history to know how much of his version of events is accurate, but he seems to think the competition has been a mutually personal one for years.”

There was the sound of someone sitting down heavily, and Keith suspected it was Shiro. “I know it wasn’t on Keith’s side. He’s _terrified_ of people. When he’s not sure how to respond or something hits one of his alarms, he’ll either find an excuse to run away or puff up and try to scare people off. He’d gotten in so much trouble for getting in fights and was so afraid of getting kicked out for it that he was trying to stick to the former around the Garrison.” There was a quiet pause. Keith had a small frustrated moment; he swore he wasn’t that afraid of people, although that was getting the oddest sense of quiet disbelief from Red. 

“So there likely weren’t any actual fights before this.” Coran at least sounded like he was just verifying it. 

“Outside of classes and training, he was either hiding behind me or finding rooftops and out of the way corners to hide in. When there was a sponsor’s ball he spent half of it hiding behind curtains; Iverson practically had to nail his feet to the floor for photos when there were events. He barely remembered the names of his own assigned squadmates in training, and I don’t think they ever realized it. I remember them just thinking he was being formal when he addressed them by relative rank. He got into a few fights, but most of them had to do with people cornering him or him getting angry about hazing attempts on other people.” 

“He did say he barely knew Lance existed when I spoke to him.” Another moment of quiet. “I wish I could be more help, but I think the best we can do is try to encourage them to think of each other as teammates until they sort themselves out.” 

“Well, it’s a start. Thanks - I mean it.” A pause. “How long did they last?” Shiro almost sounded hopeful.

“Twelve doboshes.” 

Shiro muttered something unintelligible; as soon as Keith heard Coran shift weight to leave, he moved to be around the corner and down the hallway. Mercifully, Coran headed the other direction after the door opened, footsteps fading away. 

Less mercifully, he made it to the main hallway a few steps after Lance, Hunk, and Pidge passed by. Hunk and Pidge both definitely looked back and spotted him; he considered finding the bridge fascinating again rather than heading to their rooms.

Pidge elbowed Lance in the ribs; Lance turned, looking down at the corner of the hall and the floor, hands in his jacket pockets, somehow achieving losing a foot of height on posture alone.

Pidge tugged on Hunk’s wrist, and they continued on toward the dorms.

“Listen, Keith.” Lance was keeping his voice low, barely audible. “About earlier.”

It was strained, and Keith wasn’t sure what was going on; he stayed still, waiting. 

“Hunk…kinda figured out from the shack that you’d been living alone for a while, and Pidge told us his guess was right. About your family. I mean, you not having one.” Lance still wasn’t looking at him, and seemed like he wanted to shrink even more. “…I’m sorry. I didn’t know, and that was out of line.” 

It wasn’t anything he’d expected to happen, and he wasn’t really sure what to do with it. He shifted himself, and the second mouse on his shoulders perked up, squeaking something. “…It happens.”

“…what, that’s it? You looked about ready to kill me back there.” Lance actually glanced up for a second, confused.

“Not kill you.” Injure, maybe. He couldn’t guarantee there wouldn’t have been injury if Lance had stopped him from leaving. “Look, you’re an obnoxious asshole at me a lot and I don’t get what your problem with me is, but I don’t actually hate you.” 

“And you’re not still mad that I kind of … picked on something I really shouldn’t have.” Lance shifted, looking more away again, guilt written across his face. 

Keith considered it. It was one on a list of reasons he wasn’t exactly Lance’s biggest fan lately. “I didn’t say I was _happy_ with you. I said I didn’t _hate_ you.” 

Lance drooped. “Yeah. I guess I kinda asked for it with that.” 

The list was coming to mind again. “Why are you so intent on picking at me to begin with?” 

Lance shifted uncomfortably, almost leaning to check the adjacent hallways. “You started it?”

And there was the other shoe he’d been waiting to drop. “I hadn’t even noticed you _existed_ until you shoved in trying to compete with me over rescuing Shiro.” 

“Oh come on, you spent all your time at the Garrison practically breaking your neck to be _better_ than everyone!” Lance gestured at him.

He straightened his posture, folding his arms. “I wasn’t doing that because of you, I was doing that for myself. I didn’t even notice you.” 

Lance winced, suddenly a lot less apologetic and shrinking. “Oh come on, that’s worse!”

Keith was beginning to wonder if it was that disjoint of never feeling fully human making this incomprehensible, or if it was just Lance somehow. Red was paying attention with a sort of bored exasperation. “How?”

“Because -” Lance faltered, with a sharp hand gesture, his retort stumbling. “At least if you hated me then I meant _something_ to you!” 

He was starting to feel very tired of trying to make sense of Lance. “It’s not that special. I didn’t notice most of the Garrison.”

“Your two little groupies sure seemed to think otherwise.” Lance puffed up, standing straighter to match height.

Keith just stared back, lost and confused enough to almost outweigh irritation. “Who?”

“Dana and Gabe?” Lance was staring at him as if the names should mean something.

They were sort of vaguely familiar, somewhere in the slurry of a Lot of Names that went by around the Garrison; Keith tilted his head, trying to figure out what Lance was after. 

Lance, meanwhile, had a growing expression of disbelief. “Ellis and MacCowan?” He motioned at Keith, as if prompting for a response.

Those did sound a little more familiar, like he should recognize them; it’d also been two years with a lot on his mind since he’d thought about the Garrison. There was a flicker of recognition across his face, in among the confusion.

“…The people you ran the simulators with? The ones who were probably going to be your permanent team assignment?!”

That finally brought it into more focus as he half-nodded in understanding; he did remember them, vaguely - blonde chick technician and guy with an Australian accent. “Oh. Them.” Keith shrugged. He did remember a room assignment with the guy, mostly sticking out as a lot of occasional chatter and attempts at conversation.

Lance’s jaw dropped open for a couple seconds. “ _You don’t remember your own teammates?!_ ” 

“They were people I was assigned to work with. I didn’t have much reason to have anything to do with them outside of class.”

“You - if you’d graduated you would’ve been spending months, maybe years, at a time in space with them?” Lance motioned as if that should’ve been obvious.

“I guess? The last six months before I left, I stopped thinking about it that way.” Six months between Kerberos and when he’d gotten everything together for his exit and theft. 

“You were rooming with one of them. I think both of them had a crush on you.” Lance was staring at him in awed, confused disbelief again. 

Keith wasn’t sure what he wanted or why this was that important; yeah, if he’d stayed with the Garrison, he would’ve been dealing with them more, but… he’d never really understood how the Garrison command decided who they were trying out teaming him with. They hadn’t been that bad compared to some of the attempts, but neither had he ever really felt comfortable with either of them outside of Work Coordination. 

“…Wait - left? You were trying to get kicked out?”

“Remember that one night with the fireworks?” He half-smiled, a few teeth showing. 

Lance blinked a few times, suddenly connecting the incident and the timing of Keith ‘washing out’. “Why the Hell did Iverson’s golden boy decide to go V for Vendetta on the place?”

“Pilot error.” The vicious smile widened a little, his eyes narrowed, the words venomous and a too carefully enunciated.

Lance went briefly silent. “And that’s why you get along with Pidge.” Keith couldn’t tell if Lance just meant them both having personal ties to Kerberos, the over-the-top vengeful streak, or both. “But seriously - you were rooming with one of them, how did you not pay any attention?”

“He talked a lot. I tuned half of it out. It wasn’t the first time I’d had to share a room whether I wanted to or not.” Keith shrugged. He’d learned to acknowledge and respond to just enough to not get someone angry that he was ignoring them, and retain just enough to not get caught off guard later, while still mostly ignoring them. “They both did when we weren’t in the middle of an exercise.” That was a little easier if he stayed quiet outside of things that were needed, it was less noticeable that he wasn’t very invested if they were talking to each other.

“Do you do that here?” The insecurity was creeping back in.

He shrugged. “Not really. I have my own room and I can usually just leave if I don’t want to be around people.” 

He wasn’t sure if that was better or worse, but it at least seemed to settle whatever had started to creep in. 

“…so did you ever pay attention to what those two were doing outside of class?”

“No?” He wasn’t sure why he would when the point to disappearing outside of class was to avoid people. 

“You didn’t care what they were doing.” Lance seemed to be tipping irritated.

“Why would I?”

Lance was studying him oddly. “You remember Tia? Kinda short girl, pilot, used to usually try and sit front of the class?” 

“Vaguely?” Which really meant “about as well as anyone else”; he had a sort of sense that she was quiet, focused, and mostly polite, but faded into the background enough to only really have caught his attention at all because of a couple times getting shared projects in class.

“You remember that one survival exercise up north?”

That was familiar; a good month out in the wilderness that would have been a nice trip if not for the background noise. “Yeah. She was the only one I didn't spend a lot of time yelling ‘knock it off’ at.” It was one long wall of bickering and people doing dumb shit that was not exactly conducive to ‘survival’; he did have a tiny guilty twinge of wondering if that’s what it was like to be Shiro dealing with them, even if he was getting the feeling he should re-evaluate that memory because there weren’t many ways Lance would know what had gone on there.

“They were always like that. You were the only pilot they didn’t terrorize.” Lance gave him a pointed look, and it clicked that yes, Lance had been the fifth person on that trip and among the people he’d caught upset the head with moss and lichen clumps out of sheer frustration and looking for a way to make sure he had the target’s attention when people were being stupid.

And the running wall of bickering and the times he’d nailed the other two for starting arguments in camp were suddenly clicking into place as “how things always were”.

He half-turned with a frustrated noise, as if for a moment he could stalk back to the Garrison to terrorize the both of them into cutting it out, then just folded his arms with a huff. Suddenly, he felt less bad for the odds that they’d been questioned and searched in the aftermath of his dramatic exit from the Garrison.

Lance didn’t seem to be able to decide if he was viciously smug or more quietly frustrated, and Keith could almost hear the ‘would’ve been great if you’d paid attention THEN’. “Right. Anyway. It’s late and I’m going to go crash out.” 

Lance turned, heading off toward their quarters. 

Keith started to head that way, but there was a flicker of movement off down the hallway to the side just as he passed it. He took a quick step back, twisting to peer down, and caught a flicker of black pulling back into the cover of a doorway in the hallway.

Two careful steps into the hallway with a hand on the knife on the back of his belt, and Shiro had both hands raised, grinning and not putting much effort into staying out of sight anymore. 

He relaxed, dropping his hand off the knife. “How long were you listening?”

“A while.” Shiro stepped out of the doorway; he’d probably heard almost everything. “For what it’s worth, I think the idea was you being the only one they were sure they wouldn’t be throwing to the wolves… and maybe seeing if you could get the other two to settle down.” 

Keith wrinkled his nose with a sour look. “I was not there to be Iverson’s babysitter.”

“I know.” The way Shiro was smiling when he patted Keith’s shoulder, he suspected he was being humored. “Your team on that survival exercise still came back with one of the higher scores even with getting a pretty dangerous area and...being kind of a mess.” Which was Shiro-speak for being a Lord of the Flies retelling waiting to happen.

Keith was half amazed they’d made it. “And they wouldn’t let me take a hunting rifle.” That had only been a complaint of his because it would've been much easier to get game for food that way. 

“You were fifteen. It would’ve been illegal.” Shiro was just amused at the complaint, even if he was pointing out why they couldn’t.

And “illegal” was why he’d had an act of will at the time to not point out that he already had one, even if it was a battered hand me down shoved at him after he’d traumatized some local rancher trying to bring down a javelina with a few makeshift spears, a snare, and his knife.

 

******************

 

The halls looked a little wide for a battlecruiser, but the dim lighting, dark walls, and angular arched architecture was the same. The hallways had a more looping, larger layout than he’d seen on the battlecruisers, as well. 

The patrols at least were a typical pattern; he made it across a few hallways before he spotted a flash of yellow and white around a corner, and made for it, finally catching a better glimpse close enough to give a quiet hiss of “ _Hunk!_ ”

Hunk startled, swinging his bayard around to paint the corridor; Keith was quietly thankful that while Hunk was cautious and jumpy, he wasn’t fast on the trigger. “Keith? Have you seen any of the others?”

He shook his head, shifting to where he’d be out of sight but could still keep a wary eye out for patrols. 

“Where are we, anyway? I feel like we’re here for a reason but I can’t remember it, and this is too big for a battlecruiser.” Hunk was distressed, and Keith realized he didn’t have a clue what they were doing there, either, or how they’d gotten there. “…And what happened to your teeth?”

Keith paused at Hunk's question, running his tongue along his teeth; the canines on both top and bottom were longer, and there were sharper points on just about everything in his mouth. “…Oh. We’re dreaming.” 

Hunk gave a relieved sigh, then stiffened. “Oh god are we in a nightmare? I mean we have to be in a nightmare right, why else would we be in some kind of weird Galra place if it wasn’t a nightmare - whose nightmare is it?”

“It could be anyone’s, depending on if this is an actual place or just distorted.” Distortion was plausible; they all knew the general idea of Galra internal architecture, and it would be a small subconscious step to coming up with unfamiliar and threatening places, even if he had a strange feeling that wasn't the answer.

If it was a specific place, there was only one of them that had seen Galra facilities none of the others had seen.

There was a tense silence, then Hunk looked sideways at him. “…Any ideas on how to get out of a nightmare? I mean, if we know we’re in one, that means it’s probably not ours, right?”

“I think?” He wasn’t even sure how that would work. “Maybe if we can figure out whose it is, find them, and wake them up or get them to realize they’re dreaming, that might work.” He’d been aware he was in someone else’s dream or nightmare before a few times, dimly, but never quite lucid enough to actually try to interact with it as such.

A distant scream echoing down the hall settled whose nightmare it was; Keith was almost off like a shot in the direction of it, but Hunk grabbed the back collar of his armor, lifting him off the ground and off his feet before he could even get momentum. “ _Oh no you don’t_ charging in here is probably still a bad idea and getting shot by dream-patrols isn’t going to help!” 

It took a good few seconds dangling off the ground for Keith to stop trying to squirm loose to go after Shiro, but eventually reason and what would be more likely to actually do good won out over instinct; he went limp, muttering “yeah, okay. I get it”, and Hunk set him back down. 

It was hard to keep the patience to duck through the hallways avoiding patrols and guards with the occasional scream or other noise echoing down the hallway; with the odds that this was a larger Galra facility none of the rest of them had been in sinking in, he managed some grim focus on being impressed that Shiro remembered the place well enough that minding the normal tactics and behavior of Galra drones was working. The layout, the lights, the placement of doors, was all hyper-detailed, almost to the point of being too vivid. 

They somehow managed to get there without a fight; there were two hooded, masked figures on either side of the door that vanished too quickly for Keith to get a good look. Hunk came around the corner behind him, giving him an uncertain look after noting the unguarded door, and Keith had a sinking feeling about what he remembered from Shiro’s more fragmented nightmares. 

The door opened for them. The room beyond was large and darker than even the normal gloom of Galra environs, with parts of the shadow and darkness seeming to shift and move as if it were a living thing rather than a part of the backdrop. It filled the room, a breathing black that seemed to devour any light near it.

Just in front of it there was a figure that seemed to have the darkness curling around obediently obscuring, until there was little visible but white hair and glowing yellow eyes under a gold-trimmed black hood.

“And they’ve finally managed to catch up.” 

The barbed, unsettlingly controlled comment didn’t seem to be directed at them. The door behind them closed with an ominous hiss, like an airlock sealing. 

The figure vanished, and the darkness pulled back like a ragged, living curtain. Shiro was kneeling half-crumpled in the middle of the large room; there were a few broken, blackened remnants of his armor over the undershirt and slacks. 

Hunk moved to run forward, deactivating his bayard; Keith shoved an arm out in front of him, stopping him with a sharp hiss through his teeth, activating his bayard in his other hand. 

“Keith…?” Hunk had frozen just short of his arm, glancing sideways at him nervously. There was around fifteen feet between them and Shiro, and Keith was in ready stance, weight shifted to be ready to try to open more space. 

“Shiro, wake up. This isn’t real. You’re dreaming.” He wasn’t sure if it would work, but it was worth a shot.

Shiro stirred, and looked up; his expression was blank, eyes little more than violet light. 

Keith summoned his shield and shoved Hunk aside with it; it wasn’t enough force to move Hunk, but Hunk got the message, dodging left while Keith bolted right and back. The prosthetic was on and blazing in a heartbeat, screeching across Keith’s shield with enough force for the light field to flicker. 

Hunk took another uncertain step back, freezing with a horrified expression; Keith tried to get his footing, a quick thrust and a couple swipes trying to buy an opening that Shiro sidestepped easily. There wasn’t much he could do but go full murderous and try to interject Shiro’s name or “wake up damnit!” here and there; anything less than going for blood and Shiro would either kill him or remember there was another target in the room. 

He couldn’t afford to pay much attention to Hunk as more than a background obstacle to try and keep out of Shiro’s line of sight, but he thought he saw Hunk shift, shaking off enough of the initial panic to start studying the fight for an opening. 

He somehow managed to push Shiro back, across the center of the room; he hadn’t scored any kind of hit, but gaining ground was still something. Then it went wrong; he read a shift in weight the wrong direction, and the feint turned into Shiro dancing right instead of left, inside his reach with a swipe across his sword arm that carved straight through the vambrace and partway through bone. 

Keith screamed, failing to cut it off, and staggered back. His bayard dropped, deactivating as his hand spasmed and went useless; there wasn’t any blood, but there was the reek of burned flesh, and he barely brought his shield around in time to block another strike that had enough force to push him back onto one knee.  
0  
Hunk dove, grabbing Shiro from behind, pulling up his arms at the shoulders and twisting the bad side so that it was impossible to bring the prosthetic to bear on either of them; he picked Shiro up off his feet easily, weathering a few kicks clanging off his armor with little more reaction than a grunt and a stiffer expression of determination. “Shiro, come on. It’s us. That’s Keith you’re fighting. You’re dreaming. This isn’t real.” 

Keith was breathing heavily, trying to block out the pain from his ruined arm; repeating to himself that it wasn’t real under his breath wasn’t helping. It was a small mercy that Hunk had apparently managed to succeed at restraining Shiro; maybe they would have enough time bought by that to snap Shiro out of it. 

“Sh..Shiro please.” His voice was ragged, and no matter how hard he tried for “calm”, he was failing. “Wake up. You don’t have to do this. This isn’t.” His breath caught, and he curled the wounded arm closer. “This isn’t real, and it isn’t you.” 

Shiro made a last weak attempt at squirming loose and then went oddly still and limp, the prosthetic going lower-power; Keith looked up, almost hopeful at the lack of sound of struggle, until he saw Shiro’s face, still expressionless and empty, with none of the violet light fading. 

Hunk couldn’t see it, and let out a sigh of relief, starting to relax. Keith flinched, bracing his shield in front of him, and yelled, “HUNK NO!”

Shiro was already moving, taking advantage of the new leeway to twist free, using one foot on the ground to catch Hunk off guard and push him off balance; Hunk staggered, torn between trying not to fall backward and trying not to let go of Shiro and failing at both. Keith didn’t have enough time to shift gears from bracing to diving to move as Shiro turned on Hunk.

He had his eyes closed as he charged with his shield, hoping to use it to body-check Shiro off balance; it wasn’t fast enough, and he heard the prosthetic make impact and a cut-off strangled noise from Hunk. The shield made impact, the prosthetic screaming along the shield; he could feel Shiro go off-balance and then duck into a roll, and shifted fast to move back, before Shiro could get around the shield and past his guard again, almost tripping over Hunk. 

He was trying to keep his attention focused on Shiro; he was the only one standing and the only one with a chance of trying to shake Shiro out of it, and if he didn’t focus, Shiro would kill him. It didn’t make it any easier to avoid being aware of the gaping, blackened hole in Hunk’s breastplate that went more than deep enough that part of the charred mess had to be flesh with the occasional scorched-grey of bone. 

“Shiro damnit _wake up!_ ” 

Shiro had footing back and was charging. He was uninjured and not dealing with being more shaken trying to remember that it was a dream and Hunk was probably started awake and fine in his room; Keith managed a couple of blocks, getting driven back, before Shiro got around the shield again and he wasn’t fast enough to stop the weaponized hand aimed for his throat. 

He woke up tangled in his blankets in his room, a mess of cold sweat and uncomfortable lingering phantom pain. He yanked free in a hurry, heading out of his room; Hunk was already in the hallway at Shiro’s door, trying to get it to open. 

When it stayed locked, Hunk tried banging on it a couple times; Keith was worried - usually, if one of them was in their room, the door would just recognize any of the others.

Something small and colored headbutted his ankle with a determined squeak. He looked down, kneeling to pick the mouse up, holding Plachu up where Hunk could see easily. “Plachu! Is Shiro in his room?”

The mouse shook his head fast.

“Do you know where he is?”

A nod, and Plachu jumped off his hand, running to the door at the end of the hallway.

The mouse led them to one of the sitting rooms; Shiro was on the floor in the middle, still dead to the world asleep but looking miserable and pained, with an occasional ominous flinch. Platt was next to him, nudging the top of Shiro’s head with his own, and the other two mice were sitting on Shiro’s side, apparently having some kind of involved and agitated conversation. 

Keith got in the room just ahead of Hunk with a call of “Guys, clear out!”. The mice scattered to the seat cushions, and Keith carefully walked over, keeping an eye on Shiro’s mechanical arm; it was safe when Shiro was aware, but waking him up from something like that might be more dangerous. Hunk didn’t need to be told what he was doing, and stayed a few feet away with a worried nod, waiting. 

He pushed Shiro’s shoulder hard with a foot. “Shiro! _Wake up!_ ”

Shiro did start awake fast, and Keith was glad he’d been primed to jump back, clearing the back of the couch well clear of Shiro waking up swinging; while there was a warning hum and a few flickers of violet, the prosthetic didn’t activate, but Keith was pretty sure there would’ve been enough force behind the swing to break a leg if he’d been careless anyway.

Shiro was now sitting up, blinking around the room, tense and dazed; the mice descended from all sides, climbing up to cling to his neck and nest in his hair with aggressive attempts at grooming. He stared up at both of them blearily, and Hunk let out a sigh of relief, relaxing enough to half droop. Keith was perched on the back of the curved couch like a gargoyle, still worried.

It only took a beat for it to sink in on Shiro what had happened and why they were there. He looked down, queasy guilt on his face with a groan. “…sorry.”

Plachu made a frustrated squeak, and Hunk crossed the room in a few large steps with a “Oh no you don’t!”; he knelt down just enough to grab Shiro around the shoulders, picking him up. Shiro gave a token “Hey!” in protest with a weak attempt at pulling loose, then stopped struggling in resignation as Hunk drug him onto the couch and proceeded to not let go, chin resting on Shiro’s good shoulder.

“You… know I’m not going to try to kill you, right?”, Shiro offered sheepishly, testing Hunk’s grip. 

“Yep.” Hunk squeezed for a couple seconds, burying his face in Shiro’s shoulder with a small choked whine. Shiro started to protest for air, then wilted, looking away in guilt again. Keith slid down to sit next to him, wrapping his own hand around the metal one and leaning in, his head on Hunk’s wrist. Shiro flinched with a noise of protest, the metal hand twitching, then gave up on that. 

They stayed that way in silence for a good while, then Keith shifted just enough to elbow Shiro in the ribs without letting go of his hand. “Stop blaming yourself.”

Shiro stiffened, then went boneless. “It’s bad enough when it’s just me. You guys shouldn’t have to-” 

It cut off with a voiceless ‘oof’ as Hunk squeezed enough to interrupt. “Oh no. You stop that right now. We’re a team, we’re supposed to look out for each other if someone’s hurt, and that means you, too.” He relaxed his grip enough for Shiro to catch his breath; Keith was getting increasingly sure that anymore, at least half or more of Hunk’s weight was muscle. “And as one of the legs, if anyone here is supposed to support everyone else, it’s _me_. In fact, since you’re the head, that means all of us are supposed to support _you_.” Hunk looked up, jaw set, daring Shiro to argue.

“I don’t…think that’s how it-”

Keith elbowed him again. “We’re going to notice and we’re going to worry. You want us to worry less, you sit still and let us help.” 

“I’d still rather you didn’t have to go through something like that.” He’d given up enough to be going along with them both clinging to him and the mice still curled up on him, but was staring off into the distance unhappily. 

“We’ll be fine. I mean, it’s just nightmares, right?” Hunk’s laugh was weak and nervous. 

“We’ll probably have to fight whatever that person was one of these days anyway”, Keith observed. 

Shiro paled a little with a faint, unhappy noise, tensing. Hunk shifted to lightly bap Keith’s head with the back of his wrist. “And you’re not going to be alone - we’ll make sure she can’t do anything to you ever again.” He patted Shiro’s shoulder gently, and Shiro leaned into him with a sigh of resignation. 

“It might not be that easy”, Shiro mumbled, and Keith elbowed him again. 

Neither of them were going to budge far, although they did eventually adjust to drift off to sleep, with no further nightmares.

At some point someone had turned out the lights and brought a few blankets in to drape over them. Keith only noticed blearily when the lights coming back on woke him up, and there was a blanket over him and Shiro both.

Hunk was leaning back, arms draped across the back of the couch. Shiro was curled up against him, using Hunk as a pillow, and Keith was doing his best impression of a human blanket on Shiro, the best he could manage on the narrow couch. Platt was asleep on the back of the couch, and the rest of the mice had vanished at some point. 

“Man, what party did I miss last night?”

Keith glared up at Lance blearily, Shiro only just starting to stir.

“Nightmares”, Hunk mumbled tiredly.


	12. Disconnected but not alone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last chapter of "waiting for repairs takes a while" before things start blowing up! 
> 
> Shiro may not realize it, but he's getting the entire team deciding to try to look after him as much as he tries to look after them. Coran and Allura start to make good on the "you all need to learn how to fight in low/no gravity" agreement made before the Galra crystal screwed up the castle, and Keith trips into telling Pidge more than he'd planned on.

Shiro at least seemed better for it, and Lance had shifted gears fast into “is everything okay?” from his initial jokes. 

If anything, Shiro was acting better rested than either of the other two, although Keith knew to be suspicious of that. He caught Lance making uncertain faces, glancing between Shiro and the dimly suspicious look Keith was giving Shiro. 

Shiro walked out saying something about food. Keith stared after him tiredly, weighing; it was hard to tell sometimes how much of Shiro’s ‘fine’ was actually feeling better and how much was Shiro recovering enough energy to hide things. 

Lance was still looking unsure. Hunk finally stood up, declaring that food sounded like a good idea; Lance nodded, some of the uncertainly clearing as if there had just been some second conversation Keith missed. Lance headed out first, and Hunk stopped in the doorway with, looking back with a “Keith, you coming?”

He trailed after, not sure what to expect; keeping some distance seemed like the safest bet. Lance was keeping track of him, occasionally glancing back, but not questioning it.

Instead, he was talking to Hunk ahead while they made their way through the halls. “So what happened?” 

“Keith and I blundered into one of Shiro’s nightmares. It was pretty bad.” Hunk visibly cringed at the memory. “Way more vivid than any of mine, too - if Keith hadn’t figured out we were dreaming I would’ve been trying to figure out how we got there the whole time. We tried to get him to wake up from in it, but we didn’t really have any luck until we were awake and Keith could like… shove his shoulder and get clear fast.” Hunk motioned back at him; he stayed quiet and trailing. “So we stayed there to make sure he got back to sleep and was feeling better.” 

“Man, that bad?” Lance was noticeably worried.

Hunk made some noncommittal mumbles, rubbing the back of his head. “Well, you know, year and a half, and them trying to make him into a weapon and screw him up…”

It was Lance’s turn to wince. “…was that what it was?” 

Hunk made another noncommittal mumble, sounding almost guilty. “I think I’m gonna have nightmares of my own from it.”

“At least it’s just nightmares. I mean, it’s Shiro. He’d never do anything like that.” Lance’s complete confidence almost made Keith wince; Coran wasn’t kidding about hero-worship, and it hadn’t entirely settled to something more realistic yet. 

“Doesn’t make it any less terrifying.” Hunk rubbed his chest, around where Shiro had hit him in the nightmare. 

“We’re probably all lucky he escaped when he did”, Keith added, quietly.

Both of them stopped to look back at him, Lance staring. “What?” 

“They worked him over pretty bad - you saw how dazed he was the first few days, right?” He’d stopped a few steps closer than where he’d been following. “They were trying to strip out his memory. There’s still pretty bad holes, and sometimes what he remembers changes day to day.”

“You don’t think they really could’ve…?”

“How long do you think any of us would’ve lasted?” He looked up enough for eye contact. 

It took a couple seconds to sink in, and then Lance shivered, pulling his coat closer around him. “ _dios mio…_ ”

Keith had suspected that Lance was prone to mentally skirting the edges of the worst that was going on most of the time, and it was a weird sort of confirmation watching Lance’s deep discomfort when he had to stop and think about it seriously. It was also feeling like it was a survival mechanism almost; everything they were up against yawning out like an abyss it would be easy to trip into and never come out of. 

Finally, Lance swallowed, shaking his head. “I need to get Pidge to just copy everything to the Castle for him.” 

Lance turned to continue on toward the kitchen; Keith gave the couple steps distance again before following.

As non sequitor as it was, Keith had to smile faintly at Lance’s conclusion; Shiro _could_ use more reminders of happier times and distractions from everything. 

Shiro seemed to be eating on rote routine, lost in thought with Platt pilfering unnoticed. Lance blew into the kitchen as if they hadn’t just been discussing how bad things were and how much Shiro had been through, dragging Hunk after him almost. 

And within five minutes, Lance had zeroed in on “I hadn’t known you were an old sci-fi fan!” with a broad grin. 

Shiro chuckled, shaking his head. “I think half the Garrison was somewhere, and that’s why we were there.” It was a long, proud tradition of space exploration being made up of the people who grew up on stories of what could be, after all. “You wouldn’t be the first one who wanted to be Jim Kirk when they grew up.” Shiro had a gently teasing smirk, and Lance leaned back, laughing and looking away. 

“Jim Kirk, Han Solo, and Poe Dameron”, Hunk corrected solemnly. 

“I can see it.” Shiro nodded.

“Really?” Lance actually brightened up at that. 

“Poe especially.”

And in that moment, hearing that from Shiro, Lance’s ego possibly rivaled the castle for scale.

The conversation drifted around for a while, the eternal “which captain is best” debates and hashing over the history of the Jedi code. Pidge wandered in at some point, listening for a few minutes before diving in herself, and Shiro was tossing an occasional question back at Keith by the wall, trying to tug him into it with only marginal, awkward success. 

After a while he wandered off to explore the Castle. He was starting to get a feel for the living areas and some of the outlying rooms around it; there were quarters for an actual crew, and every indication that it had once been an active ship with a number of people on board. 

They didn’t really have chances to recruit crew; on the one hand, the whole thing would probably be easier and run better if it weren’t on less than a skeleton crew, but on the other hand, an actual crew would mean a lot less peace and quiet. 

Wandering aimlessly didn’t seem to slow down Coran finding him any; the Altaean seemed to be zeroing in on where he was as if Coran knew where he was going, Pidge in tow.

“Ah, there you are.”

He stared up, trying not to look too much like a deer in headlights. 

“The training bay should be working again, and you lot need to work on low and lacking gravity!” 

Keith blinked, nodding. He had actually been worried there for a second.

“And since you two are the most melee focused, I thought I would work with the two of you together. Shore up strengths since you can all cover each other, then we can work on weaker areas.” 

Pidge shrugged; she was already in armor and didn’t seem troubled by it. Keith might have considered asking if she needed combat training in general, but then he also remembered the entire incident with the ‘tests’ where she’d taken out all four of the rest of them, confirming her status as the most terrifying member of the team. Pidge was tiny, and had been learning fast; he was almost surprised he had only caught her in the training bay a few times, and chalked it up more to schedule differences than to her not practicing. 

He was actually far more terrified, after fetching his own armor, to find Allura in armor waiting in the training bay, looking far too bright and cheerful. 

Coran actually started them on lowered gravity, drilling through adjusted forms to deal with the changes in momentum, balance, and force; some of it strayed into physics lessons as much as martial arts training. Pidge was adapting in a manner that went a little beyond taking to it naturally, and he noticed that while some of Pidge’s forms weren’t the same as what Coran was teaching, Coran wasn’t correcting it, just adjusting for it.

Which probably meant Allura had been involved already and had taught Pidge something different that Coran recognized. 

And, at one point, on half-gravity, Coran stepped back and waved Pidge over. “Alright, I’ve seen what Number Five here can do, let’s give you a test. Allura?” 

Allura smiled, and it brought to mind sharks and hyenas if one were to add bright colors, rainbows, and sparkles; she was using one of the training weapons adjusted to generate a staff. Pidge was grinning on the sidelines and Keith was pretty sure she wanted popcorn for this.

He’d seen the beginnings of ‘different form’ from Pidge, and Allura herself only confirmed the suspicion. Allura was _definitely_ not following exactly the same training, which made it not only trying to adjust to compensate for her reach advantage, but adjusting to a different set of balance gestures and tells; like an impromptu match with a much more more experienced kendo practitioner in one of the WMA swordsmanship classes, and no warning that's what it was. It wasn’t the sort of thing that would get set up on someone just starting training normally, and he was pretty sure the Altaeans were springing it on him out of a mix of knowing he wasn’t completely green and that they were dealing with live combat already anyway.

He knew what the answer would be if he complained, and it’d be “The Galra won’t be fair either”, so he was redoubling efforts to try to keep up.

It wasn’t entirely working; he wasn’t ending up a pinball again, but he was still getting a pretty thorough beating, and Allura knew how to make the most of reach and mobility with the staff. She had a few good red marks, but he was getting painted glowing blue, and Allura was throwing baiting taunts and barbs here and there like a drill sergeant in an old movie. Partway through he realized one thing that was making it even worse; it wasn’t even that Allura was completely using a different style from Coran’s, it was that she was apparently working from knowing more than one low/zero-g set of martial arts well enough to not really need to keep the movements separate, which meant he was trying to learn more than one set of patterns and couldn’t necessarily guess which one she was going to use at any time. 

He was tuning out the insults, focusing on movement; he knew where the trick was, and paying attention to the baiting was a trap. He did catch Pidge commenting on being impressed Allura hadn’t gotten a rise out of him with any of it, and something about ‘He’d have tried to slug Lance like, eight doboshes ago’. 

Eventually, she called it, catching a beat where they were both solidly on the ground enough that it wouldn’t interrupt anything restoring gravity to normal. Keith went from crouched to sitting, catching his breath; Allura almost didn’t seem winded, but she did sit down pretty heavily next to Pidge. 

“Well, for barely starting to learn, that wasn’t that bad.” Coran had a screen up from some small portable device and Keith realized he’d been taking notes. “Slow on reaction time compared to your normal performance, but that will be a matter of practice and time. You did very well at not letting the baiting throw you off and avoiding distractions!”

“It was pretty transparent.” He made a vague gesture at Allura, who was pleased with the whole thing. “What you were coaching us on was military standard for old Altaea, right?” 

Coran nodded.

“And Allura kept mixing it with something else.” It was a dry observation; odds were good he wasn’t going to run into any opponents using Altaean Military Standard training, which meant learning early to deal with unfamiliar forms was more useful than if they’d just been drilling him against Coran. 

Coran and Allura both had an odd, awkward pause. “Well, you know, better to keep you on your toes.” Coran went back to his notes. 

Now he was curious, looking to Allura. “What was it?” 

“Well, it…wasn’t really any one thing exactly - the Castle used to have people from a number of different races and cultures on board, and I was rather happy to bother almost anyone to show me what they were doing.” She shrugged.

Something was off; complete patchwork was _hard_ to get working coherently, there usually had to be one or two baselines trained well to get anywhere resembling competent, and that hadn’t looked like a patchwork of multiple methodologies. Allura’d been trained in something else almost as thoroughly as she knew the Altaean military style-set, and didn’t want to talk about it enough to deflect away and lie about it.

Red was paying the sort of bemused thoughtful attention where she expected him to have the pieces; it probably wasn’t Altaean if Allura was uncomfortable with it, the Castle having other races and cultures around wasn’t false - 

And there was only really one she _would_ be that uncomfortable having a connection with. 

He nodded, accepting it without further comment; anybody would still be reeling after what she’d been through, and if she didn’t want to talk about the breakdown between “closely allied with the Galra” to “victims of genocide by the Galra”, he wasn’t going to pressure her on it over something like this. 

Coran shooed them out after that, announcing intent to go find Lance and Hunk and wanting to make sure they could focus, leaving him and Pidge in the halls of the castle.

Pidge didn’t seem too inclined to peel off even if it was mostly aimless after they got out of armor; he didn’t have any better idea what to be doing himself. Somewhere a few turns away, she had an awkward, thoughtful pause. 

“So I did check those files. The ones from that Altaean series of Allura’s?” She was looking away.

“Yeah?”

“They’re not corrupted at all. They’re fine. The whole thing is still there.” 

“It has to do with the Galra, doesn’t it.” It didn’t take a huge leap; most of the injury Allura was covering had to do with what had happened.

Pidge was almost surprised, but sobered and nodded. “First contact. Something to do with rescuing survivors from a ship hit by raiders. Some of them end up a permanent part of the crew for the rest of the series.” 

He nodded. “I’m not surprised she doesn’t want the reminders, between what happened and waking up ten thousand years later to this.” 

“I dunno, it just seems…” Pidge shifted uncomfortably, hands in her pockets; Keith raised an eyebrow, waiting. “I mean, between what you said before and all of this… there were Galra that were basically family. How do you just snap back that hard on something that seems like there were a lot of happy memories?”

“That’s exactly why.” 

She looked up at him, waiting herself.

“Look, your family are good people. You can trust them, right?” 

She nodded.

“Now picture getting all of that yanked out from under you. People you thought you could trust, who made all the right noises, did all the right things for a while, and then when you start feeling safe and drop your guard, it all goes to Hell. And it keeps happening, or keeps getting worse, until you can't tell if they ever actually cared or were just making nice while it was convenient.” He glanced down at her, hands around his belt; it was easier when it was about Allura. “Zarkon and probably some of the others were like family, and now her and Coran might be the last Altaeans _alive_ because of them. How would you feel about reminders of ‘the good old days’ if you got to see some favorite Uncle kill the entire rest of your family, nuke Earth, and do any of this?” 

Pidge tried to answer, but it died without getting out. She looked down and away at the floor, adjusting her glasses, and followed his aimless wandering in the halls in silence for a while.

Then, she tugged on his sleeve from behind. When he stopped and half-turned, she threw her arms around his waist, face in his jacket, hug-clinging onto him. “I know that wasn’t hypothetical”, she grumbled into his ribs. 

He flinched, then shifted weight and twisted to pat her hair awkwardly. 

She finally let go, straightening her own coat and setting her glasses straight on her face, mercifully stepping back as if it weren't a big deal. 

“Man, no wonder you and Lance don’t get each other. You may as well be from different planets.” 

Technically she was right on more level than one, but he wasn’t going to tell her that. “Pretty much.”

“Things were really that bad?” She was briefly distracted by a wall panel as she asked, the question idle. 

“Texas is Hell, and there’s a lot of people in the foster care system that shouldn’t be.” Burned out social workers that were running on biases and personal beliefs or dealing with cases as numbers to process, prospective parents that expected an after-school special with a perfectly normal child and would get frustrated and angry it wasn’t what they got, or who thought More Discipline solved everything. “I know I wasn’t easy to deal with, but…”

“You were a scared kid. They were supposed to be helping you.”

She was toggling something around in the programming; the lights came up. 

“I was an angry little shit who bit people if they were in my space when I was upset. I had a bad enough record of violence that I barely made it into the Garrison’s early cadet program, and half of that was one of the good psychs vouching for me.” He wasn’t going to claim that there weren’t people who’d definitely deserved it, and he had a good clue that prospective foster parents got coached and told to expect things to not be idyllic, but he knew he’d also been hardmode. There were a couple places toward the end where he wasn’t sure if they really were as bad as some of the others, or if at that point he was just too paranoid to tell the difference. He didn’t so much settle out of being massively uncomfortable with people as learn vaguely more functional patterns and outlets, and age out to where he had a little more independence and agency in what he was doing and why.

“…Okay, so you get the bitey-stabby kind of scared.” The lights in the hallway started going off and on in a pattern, and he was starting to suspect Pidge was messing with the lights just to have something to mess with. 

“Allura does the same thing.” He wasn’t sure how old of a habit it was or if it was a new mutation of her existing personality, but he recognized some of her patterns _far_ too well. “And she’s so busy trying to be the ‘leader’ that I don’t know how to get across that she’s not always as good at hiding how upset she is as she thinks.” 

“She also doesn’t know any of us _that_ well yet, and she's dealing with a warzone on top of it.” Pidge finished whatever tinkering she was doing, leaving the panel and turning back to face him, leaning against the wall. “Also I think you get some of the broken trust parts better than the rest of us. You’d have to be an idiot to not know she’s grieving and trying to make herself be fine, but…” She motioned at Keith and the area of hallway.

He sighed, nodding; he wasn’t good with people, but he was a bloody expert on struggling with trust and trying to lash out at things before they could hurt you. “At least she talks to Coran and Shiro.” He paused, and for a moment, he checked the hallway, squinting for any sign of small furry things. “And the mice.” 

Pidge nodded, staring back in the direction of the training bay, quietly worried.


	13. The thought that God has taken sides on the path to breaking down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And now moving ahead, to trail after Collection and Extraction and counterpoint through The Black Paladin. 
> 
> Keith getting in over his head fighting a Druid means a lot more to Shiro than it does to the others. The lions are not unaware of the oncoming train they're going up against after either, even if communication difficulties make it difficult to impossible to get a clear warning across in time.
> 
> And one of the few times something on-camera is here; Zarkon has far more experience with the relay, and Keith did have his undivided attention long enough for attempts at exploiting it.

Green’s cockpit was silent most of the way back to the hangar; Keith was ragged, scorched, unsure how he was intact or what had happened to the worst of his injuries, and had his conscience nagging at him.

“…It’s my fault…you had to delay going to get them for me.” 

Green definitely would have rolled her eyes if it were possible.

“Not really. We couldn’t have done anything until the pod left that cruiser. If we’d boarded it to get them, we’d _all_ be captive now.” Pidge’s voice was distracted and grim.

The exchange seemed to snap Shiro out of his own thoughtful daze, as he turned to get a better look at Keith, questioning; it wasn’t like it was hard to pick out the damage to his armor. Keith had recognized the five-eyed mask from Shiro’s nightmares once he’d gotten a clear view of the thing from the doorway, and now had a healthy respect for why they were such a feature in the nightmares, but didn’t want to admit to that. Besides, he hadn’t gotten to see the thing’s mask to recognize it until he was at the chamber full of quintessence, which was a little late to back out.

Shiro’s questioning look turned to alarm and concern. 

“There was this - creepy hooded figure with a mask taking some kind of big container from the ship. I slipped off to follow them and see what they were doing, and then tried to steal one of the jars. It noticed me. The damn thing kept teleporting whenever I tried to hit it and used some sort of weird black lightning. The others got my distress call before yours, and had to stop and get me first.” Keith held up the hand that no longer had a gauntlet, part of the vambrace still twisted and jagged as the self-repair systems were working overtime to try and recoup the damage. Pidge turned and leaned around the pilot’s seat to shoot him a glare for his phrasing, and he could feel Green echoing it, a sense of live growth filling the cockpit while Red echoed agreement with them, nudging from the back of his mind.

Shiro went pale, then grabbed him by the shoulders, and Keith could almost overhear the edges of indistinct fears, images of him in the claws of the masked monsters. “ _You tailed a Druid alone?!_ ”

“I didn’t know what it was, just that it looked important!” He held up his hands; he wasn’t going to argue that it’d been a decision he regretted.

For a panicked moment, Shiro caught the collar of his armor, tugging him around trying to check over, then grabbed his damaged vambrace with the prosthetic, going over Keith’s hand with his good one as if the unharmed-looking skin would peel off with a touch or were some kind of illusion; it was the most harried and afraid he’d ever seen Shiro. “How…?”

“It - _was_ ruined, the thing broke one of the vials of quintessence or whatever and it got all over me - it soaked in and healed it.” He was as lost as Shiro on explaining it.

Shiro stared at the hand, feeling it over for another minute, then pulled him into a tight hug. “Don’t _ever_ do that again.”

He put an arm around Shiro. “…I’ll be careful.”

“You don’t understand.” Shiro was still visibly afraid; it was starting to be unsettling. “I’ve seen those _things_ turn people to ash, tear the life out of them, rip apart people’s minds, twist them into -” Shiro trailed off, tensing protectively, and Keith could hear the metal fingers on Shiro’s right hand scrape across his armor. 

Shiro’s arm and memory blanks suddenly had a clearer explanation of the cause attached to them from that as well, and it was a sobering moment of just how close a call it really was - and something that had to hit Shiro harder coming on the heels of Allura’s capture. “…Sorry.” 

“I told you it was a bad idea to go out that door”, Lance grumbled, frustrated; it was barely audible. Keith shifted to look away as Shiro let go of him; what he saw in that room was apparently valuable information, judging by Coran’s reaction, but Lance had been right - it wasn’t one of his better ideas. 

“Look, on the list of things we have to worry about right now, Keith pulling a dumb stunt gathering otherwise useful intel is the _least_ of them and it’s _over_ and there’s nothing urgent about it right now, so can we not pick at that when we’ve got much, much worse problems?!”, Pidge snapped, frayed and angry. There was a rumble from Green punctuating it that could be felt through the floor of the cockpit; Keith was beginning to get the feeling all of the lions were on edge, that it wasn’t just the pilots. 

Red definitely felt uneasy, and when he tried to send a query, her attention seemed pointed toward the Sword of Damocles she’d been trying to warn him about, looming closer over their heads. Keith leaned against the wall of the cockpit, watching his gauntlet pull itself back together and rebuild around his hand; a little focus on it brought a diagnostic readout up across his visor. The best he had for the Altaean was leaning on Red, and the vague concept-translation didn’t really do much besides relay that it wasn’t just his imagination - the basic self-repair system was working at a ridiculously accelerated rate, probably not far off from the unnatural healing of his hand, and Red’s editorial commentary impression that it was amazing luck because he was going to need it.

At least he wouldn’t have to set it up in its storage chamber to let the Castle handle the more severe repairs. 

Shiro had recovered his composure, although Keith suspected it was being held together with duct tape, push-pins, and sheer survival-instinct determination right now. “Pidge is right. Let’s get back to the bridge and we can plan from there.”

Nobody was thinking straight at first. He wanted to think he was, but as much as Red was practically seeing the ropes holding the sword over their heads fraying at the idea of going to Zarkon’s central command, she growled in the back of his mind at the idea of running away as much as everyone else did, and was on an angle to be Pointedly Aware that whatever he told himself and tried to put forward, it was fear as much as anything else informing that idea.

His mind kept going back to what Allura and Corran had said about what happened to their predecessors, and Red’s attempt at a warning about Shiro. They weren’t ready for this, they didn’t have time for more of a plan than hit and run, and he didn’t really want to find out the hard way what Zarkon had done to the previous Black Paladin. 

Red had been growing more and more tense, agitated with the whole thing herself, and frustrated every time he worried about what had happened to Shiro’s predecessor, the warnings still not translating. He was still distracted by it as they prepared to split up to the hangars.

Hunk was the first one to say something. “…Hey guys. I know I’ve said I thought my lion was scared before when it was really just me, but - this time I think she really _is_ scared.”

“So I’m not the only one who feels like something’s really wrong here?” Pidge looked back, just short of her door.

“No”, Keith said, not elaborating past that. 

Lance paused. “What could be going on that’d have them afraid?”

“We’re going in to face Zarkon’s entire command center and the attendant fleet and we’re completely not ready for it. It’s a bad situation. We’re all on edge.” Shiro was focused and determined, keeping the calmly tired tone of 'I understand it's awful but this is what we Have To Do'; Keith got the feeling he was including the lions as much as the rest of them in that.

There was something else to it, that much Keith could get from Red, and from everyone else’s expressions, he wasn’t the only one getting that impression from them. 

There was something, a fragment of memory that was just voice and a bit of emotion, that stuck in his head for a moment as he got ready. Whatever the lions were trying to communicate, it wasn’t coming through clearly in the static of high emotion, everyone else’s tension, and the difficulty getting anything more fine than ideas and concepts across; actual fragments of memory had to be almost the equivalent of screaming over the background noise.

“ _Look all you like, you’ll never find what you’re looking for. They’re _gone_ , and I. Don’t. Know. Where the pieces are._” 

Alfor’s voice, with a tone of cold, smug victory to it. It made him more uneasy. 

Something else was bleeding in as they split up, a different presence behind it, cool and fluid. A snatch of Zarkon’s voice - “ _One way or another I will find out._ ”, answered by a quiet growl from an unfamiliar voice of “ _No, you won’t._ ”, and a vague sense of pressure, the muted echo of feeling something sharp driven through the chest of whoever’s memory it was. 

There was another push over the relay, just before they launched. 

There was pain, and teetering close enough to death to be have hit a broken kind of half-mad; there was no attempt at guarding or covering, in fact, it was as if throwing everything open was its own sort of weapon, a vicious triumph - dying didn’t matter, he’d won the day. “No barriers, nothing hidden, no secrets, isn’t that right, _Aresh_?”

He had to pause in the moving bike to check that there hadn’t been a clawed hand around his throat. It had been Alfor’s voice again, but the last word was some kind of Galra archaicism that didn’t translate well to anything English, a mesh of different concepts that were getting lost in among the tangle of other emotional noise. 

The lions were trying to warn him about something and it was snagging on the general tension of the situation, pieces hovering together that he wasn’t sure he wanted to connect, but one thing did get through - Red drew attention to Shiro again. Shiro was a target, more than the rest of them, and he needed to look out for and support Shiro here. 

They had a valiant first charge, and then Voltron froze under pressure from something that was definitely not any of them, an insidious overwhelming possessive malice that threw the relay into disconnected noise and seeped in between the gaps to push them all apart.

He didn’t realize it was Zarkon at first, still wanting to not quite put together the pieces the lions had been all but screaming at them. He was glad for Red’s warning; it wasn’t hard to get him watching out for Shiro and Black, but the extra flags that there was something to worry about managed to be nagging reminders to check periodically even with the chaos of the rest of the firefight. 

Zarkon’s attention focused on him almost as soon as he was lining up an attack, a solid presence over the relay, and what Red had been trying to warn him about became impossible to avoid. It was Smaug opening his eyes, the moment when all the stories proved wrong by falling short, where there was no way to warn in words; the void made into a living thing, a black hole given a cold and calculating mind. 

He hadn’t even entirely moved to shoot when Zarkon had looked up, and as he fired it sank in that Zarkon must’ve heard his intent, already unimpressed and wholly unconcerned. Zarkon was on the relay, aware of them, and far more comfortable with it than they were; the others might not have figured out yet how to read him over it, but Zarkon had long experience, eyes on him in the cockpit as much as on the lion, a black-marked bayard in hand.

 _I remember when your ancestors were still mastering banging rocks together, boy._ He knew the voice that echoed in his head from Shiro's nightmares and bits of memories that weren't his.

The carvings in the tomb. "if that's the worst of your conflicts", Coran and Allura’s vague exchange before they changed their minds, Coran backpedaling that maybe they _should_ learn to shield their minds, ‘just in case’ of something trying to get into them, Coran snapping at him and Lance about their predecessors fighting. He could almost hear a gravelly, inhuman laugh as he put together what they’d been avoiding all this time, that their own allies had hidden the truth from them. _And delivered you neatly to me._

Zarkon was testing through the entire fight, a dark mass feeling around the edges of his mind and a voice in his head, _you can’t hope to win this_ , weighing _kneel and serve or die_ , testing _you can be broken_ \- if he tried to flee he’d be dead before he’d even finished turning to run, retreat wasn’t an option, all he had to do was survive, something in his head had Zarkon digging further, maybe he could cause enough collateral damage between the two of them to deactivate the barrier blocking their escape -

Not that an idea like that would get past someone who knew how to watch his mind over the relay, particularly not someone who was sifting through his mind and being like water poured into a junk drawer; Zarkon switched strategies to something that allowed more focus on the lion almost as soon as the idea occurred to him. The pressure on the relay kept tightening around him, demanding attention and trying to force submission to the point that he was keeping moving and fighting purely on just short of twenty years worth of pent-up spite and wounded-animal anger, weaponizing every single moment he’d spent in his life wanting to snarl back at people he didn’t have the power to defy and pouring it into Red; social workers, relatives, teachers, neighbors, bad foster placements, Iverson and Garrison command, _pilot error_.

Zarkon saw something in him that got a sudden, noticeable perk of interest and amusement, something echoing in his head as much as what was said out loud.

“ _You fight like a Galra, soldier._ But it won’t be enough!”

The vague feeling of mental claws tightened and yanked hard suddenly as Zarkon was taking aim; one way or another Zarkon was going to have a victory out of this. Red wasn’t going to be able to get moving fast enough to get out of the way, the Lion could recover to a usable state from a blow that would kill him; Zarkon had a clean shot on every avenue. There wasn’t much he could do but brace for impact, and he wasn't sure if he should hope Zarkon meant to take prisoners - or think of Zarkon going for the kill as a mercy.

He didn’t entirely register Shiro being back in the relay until a few beats after Black had snatched Red out of Zarkon’s path, Shiro’s protective fear and rage wedging in between him and Zarkon over the relay like a steel wall. He wasn’t sure if Shiro actually managed to make Zarkon let go, or if Zarkon had let go to humor them. The last Keith sensed of the Galra dictator wasn’t nearly surprised or alarmed enough for Keith’s sanity, as if he felt that he’d still dealt a blow enough that he could press it after. He wanted to tell himself that the barrier going down a few moments later probably changed that, but he didn’t feel like he’d come out of it much better off than Red. 

He was still dazed when they hit the wormhole, and found that he needed a moment to remind himself that his hands had always ended in human nails rather than half-retractable claws, that his teeth weren’t sharp. The vague feeling of something not being right about _him_ that he’d grown used to and tuned out all his life, that he’d pushed out of his mind whenever it crept back into notice, came back louder than ever. He wasn’t sure if it was just residual nerves that he could still almost feel Zarkon’s mental claws in him, or if something had been left behind when Shiro cut in, pieces broken off and stuck inside somewhere.


	14. Will you remember who I was when another takes my place

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith's not actually that thrilled to work with the Black Lion, and spends a while building a fire and trying to keep Shiro from passing out, digging for anything to try to keep Shiro talking. 
> 
> And once they're rescued, he's trying not to say anything about having gotten Black to work with him, even briefly, to Pidge and the Altaeans. (Pidge also may not realize just how much of an impression she's made here.)

Black was an entirely different thing to work with from Red; it was like sitting on top of the heart of a galaxy, the empty void of stars that he’d felt whenever he’d walked into the cockpit before sifting feelers into his mind alongside Red’s flames. 

Red was still battered and recovering, worse off for the fight with Zarkon on top of being forcibly ejected from the wormhole, and there was a very delicate sort of watchful courtesy to her not-really-awake shifting to let Black’s contact through enough for him to work the controls. 

Red had felt like belonging, home, something he’d been seeking for a long time settling into place warm around him. He wasn’t sure if it was more his own low-level panic and emotions over the situation or the awkward nature of working with someone else’s lion, but he felt like an imposter the entire time even if Black was cooperating easily enough; he didn’t belong there, it was Shiro’s place. 

Shiro managed to stagger into Black’s cockpit under his own power, but that was pretty clearly not something that was going to last horribly long. Keith ran partway out to help him in, tugging one of Shiro’s arms over his shoulders for support. Shiro was in pain and noticeably bad off, but was smiling while he was helped to the pilot’s seat; Keith played extra support so that he could ease into it.

Shiro put his hands on the controls weakly, but the smile faltered, pale and tense, and there was a concerned rumble in Keith’s head from both Red in the back of his mind and Black surrounding him.

Shiro was pulling back, on the edge of a freeze; the adrenaline and survivalistic necessity to get away had worn off, he winced and pulled a hand back to cover the black and faintly violet-glowing wound in his side, and he was fresh out of whatever Zarkon had done over the relay to break them up and get him thrown out of the lion before. Keith knew what getting Zarkon’s direct attention on the relay felt like, and Shiro had been the first and hardest hit that way, with the least warning. 

“Here.” Keith put a hand on his shoulder, nudging him to move over; Shiro shifted as best he could with a faint pained noise. Keith settled awkwardly into the narrow space on that side as best he could, one arm back around Shiro’s shoulders. He put his free hand forward on the controls on that side, then looked to Shiro. “Work with me here. We need to at least get to Red, okay?” 

Shiro grimaced, but nodded; he still had one hand over the wound, but reached forward with his other hand. 

The result was an awkward mess, Shiro leaning on Keith physically and mentally, just focused on moving. Keith half suspected that the only reason it worked was Black trying to follow their intentions even if their ability to coordinate controls that way was spotty at best, the lion half-limping across the landscape in a drunken lope. 

When they got to where Red was resting, Black flopped over in a sprawl, head resting on the ground. Keith tried not to think about how weak and fragile Shiro felt during the entire exercise; after trying to work in the relay that closely, he was unsure now how much of Shiro’s difficulty getting Black to move was flinching and how much was just not having the strength. 

“Come on, I need to try and see to that.” He tugged Shiro out of the pilot seat, offering as much support as he could to get Shiro on the ground next to it; Shiro wasn’t arguing with any finagling to get a better look at it.

He’d expected to need to get the armor off to get to it. There was a gaping hole just below the breastplate, the underlayers and Shiro’s clothing under it torn open and weirdly eaten-away around it. 

Red nudged him to use the sensor readouts in the armor. His faceplate was suddenly covered in Altaean gibberish; he hadn’t realized it, but the armor apparently had some impressively detailed biometric sensors and scanners built into it, along with basic life support systems and emergency systems. He couldn’t make heads or tails of most of it, and suspected that would be true even if he could read Altaean for the sheer amount and apparent detail, but Red was able to break down some of the important points - the hole in the armor was a problem, but the emergency systems were probably going to be Shiro’s best chance for survival; taking the armor off would mean taking off its feeble attempts at stabilizing him. 

The ragged clawmarks seemed wider than they should’ve been; the entire area around the wound was an angry red, while the edges and part of the inside of it were an ugly necrotic greyish-brown with unnatural black underneath the glowing violet. It wasn’t bleeding more than faint smears. 

It wasn’t a poison, but whatever it was, it was having about the same effect as one, and the lack of bleeding was possibly more worrying than if it’d been bleeding as much as it should have been. 

“Well doc? Am I going to make it?” Shiro patted his arm at the end of the weak joke, giving him a lopsided smile.

At first he only managed a quiet, choked noise, and Shiro went quiet, catching the way his face had fallen. 

“I don’t - there’s nothing I can do.” Shiro’s armor was doing all it could to try to slow it, but it couldn’t stop it. “We need to get you to the Castle.” The cryopods could apparently flush it out of his system, but there was no telling where the Castle was or how long it would take to find them. 

Shiro tried to give his arm a squeeze; it didn’t do much through the armor. 

“…Let me get you outside - I can start a fire.” It would at least be something that wasn’t sitting in the cockpit, praying. 

He left Shiro resting against a rock near Black’s claws when he went to gather material for a fire; he tried not to stray too far, keeping up a running narration and blurting out any dumb thing that entered into his head in an effort to keep Shiro talking, nudging the lions to check that Shiro was still there whenever there was a quiet lull. 

They did help make it easier to pick out Shiro’s mind and energy from between them, but that just made it harder to not notice how frail and fading it was, and neither of the lions could give a good answer to how fervently he wanted someone to tell him Shiro would be alright. 

He wasn’t sure what the fibrous material he’d gathered was, but the sensors in his armor assured him it would work for a fire, so he set to work building a campfire pit.

Shiro seemed to be nodding, expression turning dull; Red seemed to agree with every bit of emergency first aid training he’d ever had about this counting among times it was a bad idea to let someone sleep. He scrambled for something, anything, not wanting to go anywhere near what had just happened; there had to be something less depressing he could grab onto.

“Hey, Shiro, remember that kid from the Renfaire that one year?”

Shiro made a confused listening noise, at least looking up at him as he was arranging the larger bits. 

“You know. The one where I broke all the scripted scenes? Elaine?” 

It took a little too long for Shiro to think, and seemed to take a real act of effort. “Nine or so, muddy blue dress?” 

“Yeah. You were with a couple of the other cast on their break, remember?” He was fussing with the tinder, forcing himself to focus on back then instead of now to keep his hands from shaking. 

“Mmmn. Kind of? They had no idea what you were doing when you rode in with her.” He tended to lurk around the edges of the Faire half of the time; Shiro hadn’t seen what’d happened leading up to it - it’d been an act of pure impulse, the Dread Black Knight wading into a small gaggle of unattended elementary schoolers, scaring off ‘friends’ from her elementary school who’d shoved her into a puddle and were terrorizing her for ‘not being a real girl’. He hadn’t really been thinking about planning ahead when he’d gone from trying to calm down the crying child clinging to him, to scooping her up and riding into one of the central areas.

“Yeah. I was sort-of looking for her family, but it turns out riding around in full armor when nobody expects you to be there draws attention.” He didn’t think he had his own supplies for starting fires on him, but there was something built into the gauntlets Red nudged him at that was probably actually meant as a survival tool; it was too weak to do much more than light tinder. “How much do you remember of it?”

“A little I think. You probably remember the story better than I do, it’s…pretty spotty.” 

“I know. But can you try to tell as much as you can anyway?” 

Shiro gave him a faintly exasperated, tired look.

He looked down, focusing on guarding the tiny spark of a campfire; it was taking effort to keep a calm tone. “Shiro, I need you to keep talking.” 

He just needed to make sure Shiro stayed awake until the others found them. Allura had to be able to find them, wherever they were, it couldn’t be too long. 

Shiro let out a tired breath. “Well, I remember a lot of ‘what the Hell is Kogane doing’ from the people on break.” It was a refrain well known around the Garrison, the Renfaire, and honestly a lot of other places. “One of the older knights showed up before the family did…something about an older sibling that was supposed to’ve been watching her. You had this entire loud dramatic angry speech… about the justice of the nobility and royalty failing and how rotten the land was that children getting tormented was just ignored and the norm.” Shiro paused, and Keith looked up from the growing fire to make sure he was still awake. “I remember thinking how your ‘dread black knight’ character was just you. If you didn’t have to think about getting in trouble for things.” 

“I wasn’t that bad about it.”

Shiro raised an eyebrow. “You demanded to fight in her honor in the tourney that day. So she’d have a place at the royal table. Before her parents caught up. Off the cuff and without anybody having a chance to plan for it.”

Keith coughed a little; the fire was finally getting strong enough for him to be able to step away, and he walked over to sit down next to Shiro, edging close.

“You’re lucky they all decided to roll with it. I don’t know what you and the other one said before that last bout… but you had a lot of pent-up anger you were letting out there.” 

“He told me to cut loose a little, because her parents were okay with letting her do the banquet thing, so they were adjusting the planned parts of the script for me to win. We hadn’t had time to really choreograph well.” 

Shiro snorted faintly. “I think he regretted that after. Must’ve been black and blue all over.” He was still trying to play off the injury, even though it was obvious there just wasn’t the energy behind anything there should have been. “Wondered sometimes what happened with her after that.”

“I gave her parents my side e-mail to give to her. I answered everything in character for as long as I could. She didn’t call me on it until a little after the launch. It took me a week to answer.” It had been the most awkward slow exchange he’d ever had; it was a lot easier to handle when he could hide behind the persona. 

Shiro was giving him an odd sideways look, nudging his hand. “What? I know what I did when I got involved there. I’d been the one getting shoved around for being different. Nobody ever showed up to help me. For those few years she needed the Dread Black Knight to believe in, and I didn’t…really want to replace him with some cadet that didn’t know what they were doing.” 

“You don’t give yourself enough credit.” Shiro squeezed his wrist weakly.

“Neither do you”, he shot back, giving Shiro a sharp look.

Shiro looked away uncomfortably, changing the subject back. “So what happened?”

He frowned, curling up to pull his knees to his chest. “I know she was wanting to get into the Garrison after that. I had to stop replying when I left; I didn’t want to get her in trouble if they found that e-mail looking for me. The night before we left to find Blue, I sent a short message that I was going to be gone and wasn’t sure if I’d ever be back, after I’d sent out a couple warnings to the smarter conspiracy people to stay out of the area and closed down some of my accounts. I don’t know if she replied or not.” 

“Putting affairs in order?” Shiro raised an eyebrow at him.

“Look, I figured either we were going to find something that would get us off the planet, the aliens would find us, or we’d be on the run. One way or another we weren’t going back.” 

Shiro shook his head and rolled his eyes, one shoulder shifting in a tired attempt at a shrug. 

“It’s not like I had much anyway.” All he owned was in the shack, and he didn’t have much he really valued he couldn’t shove in a pocket or his bag. There was next to nobody who’d notice he was gone anymore either; maybe one of the ranchers he did odd jobs for sometimes realizing they were down a pair of hands. 

He couldn’t really conscience telling anyone where his shack was to leave what was there to anyone, either, not when there was the risk of the Garrison finding it trying to hunt him - and Shiro - down. 

“You didn’t have to burn bridges like that.” He’d never had a lot to his name, but Shiro would know that there’d been a bit more than that before Kerberos. 

He gave Shiro a humorless look. “Shiro, they told everyone you were dead. They shut down any attempt at questions _hard_. They knew more than they were saying, and I didn’t want to find out what they’d be willing to do to keep it buried. Especially since-” 

He faltered; for a moment he almost was afraid to look to check that he didn’t have claws, the echo of Zarkon’s voice in his head and the still-raw feeling of Zarkon pulling on something. Shiro squeezed his wrist, worried.

“…I - you know what I told you. I didn’t want to find out what they’d do to me if - if I was asking too many questions and they realized I wasn’t all human.” Watching how fast they were to cover up Kerberos, all of his late childhood nightmares of vivisection and imprisonment as a specimen didn’t seem so far-fetched anymore. “And I couldn’t just give up on you like that.”

“You know I’d rather you didn’t light yourself on fire for my sake.” It rolled out drily.

“You were all I had.” And his voice was faltering; it was a past-tense, but not a very long one, and it wasn’t the same with anyone else. He still felt like he barely knew any of the other people on the ship, even if he was closer with them than he’d been with anyone else other than Shiro in the past. 

“I mean it, Keith. I’d rather you have a life and do well.” Shiro was trying to sound stern, but it was taking too much effort. 

And Keith caught the fatalistic turn there, his throat wanting to close up on him. “Then don’t leave.” 

“I don’t _want_ to, but…it doesn’t work that way. It didn’t then either.” Shiro was sounding more tired; Keith shifted his hand to grab Shiro’s wrist, digging his fingers into the material between pieces of armor. 

“Don’t do this, Shiro-” His voice cracked and his eyes were burning; he almost wanted to start yelling - that Shiro had been the only person who’d cared enough to put up with him, who’d cared about _him_ and not what he could do or what they could get out of him, that Shiro couldn’t do the same thing to him as every other good thing in his life and turn on him or leave him, but he couldn’t bring himself to lash out like that at Shiro. “I didn’t have _anything_ then, I was - the Garrison was _running away_ , I wanted off that shitty planet and maybe to find what I was, I was this close to being that idiot who walks out into cornfields _hoping_ to get abducted-” If it’d been him on the Kerberos mission he probably would’ve been thrilled to see the alien ship right up until he realized what they were like. “And all I was to them was some high-scoring poster boy they could show off!” 

He loosened his grip on Shiro’s wrist after he saw a bit more of a pained look; he wasn’t sure if it was his fault or not, but he had been all but clawing into Shiro’s hand. “I couldn’t trust them anyway…they buried everything too fast, like they had - some idea what was out there already. Pidge was listening to the Galra’s transmissions, the Garrison had to’ve noticed them too. They were way too fast to your pod when it came down.” He curled up against Shiro, leaning on his shoulder, wrapping his hand around Shiro’s wrist and hand more carefully. 

And he realized which side he was sitting on; Shiro had mentioned the mechanical arm having a sense of touch, but he doubted he could do anything to it that would actually cause pain, which was an odd relief. Either way, he needed to at least shove everything down enough to keep his own reactions under control; this was hard enough on Shiro without him making it worse. 

Shiro opened his mouth, but gave up, not coming up with anything, and just leaned into it a little. 

It felt like hours, with continued attempts at keeping Shiro talking as much as he could, trying more and more to push back against Shiro’s fatalism and attempts at passing the torch - he might’ve gotten Black to move in an emergency, but he wasn’t a leader, he didn’t think the others would follow him, and he certainly wasn’t ready to try to take Shiro’s place or to lose Shiro again. Keith was afraid to check with Red or the armor’s readouts to confirm how long it had been.

The Green Lion coming out of the wormhole into the atmosphere was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

Pidge was waving cheerfully after she landed; it lasted for all of two seconds and her noticing the way Shiro wasn’t really moving and Keith wasn’t straying from his side before she was running over, yelling over her comm. “ALLURA GET THE CASTLE DOWN NOW.” He saw the glowing lines of sensor readouts on Pidge’s helmet as she scrambled across both their legs to kneel over Shiro, the Castle whipping up dust and rocks as it landed nearby.

“Oh god oh god oh god…” 

“’Snot that bad”, Shiro slurred, and Pidge punched his breastplate on the other side from the wound; it was visibly wider with a larger margin of necrotic mass than had been there when Keith checked earlier, faint glowing violet lines visible under Shiro’s skin spreading out from it.

Allura came out of the Castle’s elevator pod at a run, Coran right behind her. Pidge turned, almost pointing to try and say something, but it was obvious Allura wasn’t stopping for anything; Pidge scrambled out of the way and Keith awkwardly scuttled sideways enough to give her space as she scooped Shiro up, carrying him bridal-style back to the castle at a run as if he weighed next to nothing. 

Coran made a few awkward gestures and a half-explanation about catching the armor’s vitals and biometrics from orbit before he turned to chase after her; Keith and Pidge were on their feet and on his heels, barely making it into the Castle’s drop-pod before it rose back into the ship.

Allura made it to the infirmary with them trailing behind, snarling at the catches on the armor. Keith dove in to help, the latches unlocking a little easier for him than they did for her, with the feeling of the lions keeping track and communicating to get around the normal security. 

Shiro was barely conscious and fading by the time they got him into the pod; Keith slumped forward leaning against it with his eyes closed as soon as it was sealed. Coran was busily focused on the screens from the center console, occasionally muttering to himself as he managed the infirmary, staring at the screens with furrowed brows.

Shiro would be okay. They’d barely made it, but Shiro would be okay. 

Pidge tugged on his vambrace. “What happened?”

“I don’t know, something got him on the command ship…” Keith shook his head, hair mussing against the side of the pod; he had been trying to steer Shiro away from fatalistic rambling, and asking what had caused that was the opposite of it. 

“He was attacked by a mystic more powerful than any I’ve ever seen.” Allura was hovering close, anger starting to win out over worried panic now that he was safe. 

Something sank in with a sense of dread. “…White hair…?”

Allura nodded grimly.

The second figure in the tomb painting, the one standing behind Zarkon in Shiro’s memory, the one in Shiro’s nightmares.

“Hunk and I managed to interrupt her trying to kill him; I didn’t have a chance to see how badly he was wounded before we fled and he took the Black Lion back.” 

Keith gave a weak laugh. “Hunk did promise to make sure she never did anything to him again.” 

Allura raised an eyebrow; Pidge gave a brief questioning look that dropped soon after. 

“I believe that she did something to the wormhole as we were leaving. You’re all lucky you were thrown out - it was growing increasingly unstable, and Coran and I would not have escaped if Pidge had not managed to build some kind of amplifier for her lion to give us an exit beacon.” 

He shifted enough to look down at Pidge, finally stepping back from leaning against the pod. He managed a few weak hand gestures, mouth open trying to find something to say, then just dropped into a half-kneel to hug her, burying his face in the shoulder of her armor. 

Pidge had saved all of them; Coran, Allura, and Shiro. 

She froze awkwardly for a half-beat, then leaned in to return the hug. “Sorry it took so long. I thought Allura would find us at first, but it was taking so long…”

He squeezed tighter, grumbling at her to stop it, barely covering a faint growl. 

“…Yeah. I’m glad we made it when we did.” She gave his back an awkwardly-angled pat, just under the armor’s thrusters. 

He didn’t want to let go for a few minutes; his chest ached, he was exhausted, and he was fighting to not just break down and let everything out. There was another hand on his shoulder, Allura’s dress beside them.

“It’ll be okay. We just need to go find Lance and Hunk, and…”

He stiffened, cutting Pidge off, and let go to stand back up. “They’re still out there?!”

Pidge stared up at him with one eyebrow raised, and Allura gestured at the room being empty except for them and Coran. 

“Well, they weren’t grievously injured as of the last readings I had before they were thrown out of the wormhole, so the two of you were a higher priority”, Coran added, still mostly focused on the consoles. 

“We need to go get them.” Keith paused. “I need to get Red in her hangar.” 

“We also need to get the Black Lion returned to its hangar.” Allura’s voice was quiet, and she looked back distantly at Shiro’s pod; it wouldn’t be a fast healing process.

Keith froze, half-turned to go out, turned back with a few awkward gestures its way, and grimaced. “Let’s just… see what we can do.”

Pidge and Allura both stared at him in consternation.

“Look, if we explain to Black what’s going on and that we have to go get the others, Black might let someone else at the controls long enough to get into the hangar, since it’s an emergency.” 

There was a pause from the light console, as Coran joined the other two in staring at him; Pidge had a look like there she was trying to make sense of mental math written in unfamiliar alien script.

“Not common, but not unheard of for the lions to allow a temporary pilot if absolutely necessary”, Coran commented, returning to his work. 

Allura shrugged. Keith looked up to Coran. “Is he going to be okay?”

“Well, it’ll take a while, but as long as we can avoid blowing up the Castle’s crystal again, he’ll be good as new. You lot go get the lions ready, I’ll be on the bridge as soon as I’ve got the last few settings adjusted here.” Coran waved them off with one hand.

Allura waited next to Keith’s makeshift campfire as Pidge and Keith got their respective lions settled; Pidge met Keith on the way back out to the elevator pod, and soon all three of them were standing in front of the Black Lion.

Pidge was looking up at Keith, still studying him strangely. Allura held a hand up to the Lion’s jaw, focusing with a faint glow around her hand. “Please let us in. Your Paladin is incapacitated, and we need to go find the other two, but we can’t leave you here. We just need to bring you into the Castle.” 

The lion shifted enough to open its jaws.

It felt even more wrong somehow to be in the cockpit without any sign of Shiro than it did when Shiro was too out of it to properly pilot. He could feel Black watching him as they all stood in the cockpit, staring at the back of the chair and the controls; he knew he could probably do it, but he didn’t want to, particularly not after Shiro’s insistence on him taking over.

He didn’t know how to lead. He was horrible with people. He barely knew the others, he was still fighting with Lance, almost anyone would make a better Black Paladin than he would, and sitting in that chair with his hands on those controls felt like setting himself up for something that he didn’t want to think about as a possibility. Shiro was fatalistic enough sometimes without giving him the idea he didn’t need to worry about the others if something happened to him.

Allura stepped forward after a minute, settling into the pilot’s seat; there was something stiff in her posture, and she spent a minute just sitting there, taking a few measured breaths.

Keith took a beat to remember why it was such a tense thing among all of the other worries; for her, that seat had been Zarkon’s far longer than it had been Shiro’s, and Zarkon had proven he could challenge Shiro for it. 

For a brief flicker, there was a mental image of Allura as a child, in the cockpit, sitting in the lap of a tolerant, less-scarred and yellow-eyed Zarkon who seemed to be in the middle of narrating and gesturing at something on the screen.

The image pulled away, vanishing almost as soon as it was there. He glanced down, and Pidge was shaking her head with an odd squint; she must’ve seen it too. 

He actually felt guilty for not stepping forward himself, then remembered -

They weren’t supposed to know. Both Allura and Coran had made effort to avoid them finding out that Zarkon was the previous Black Paladin, even avoided warning them about what Zarkon could do to them. He had just enough restraint and was just this side of too worn down to confront it right then, but he could also still feel the creeping echoes of Zarkon’s mental claws in him, Zarkon’s amused addition to his realization that Coran and Allura had hid everything from them. She had to realize they knew now, right?

There really wasn’t a way to bring it up _without_ confronting them over having hidden it, and they couldn’t afford that argument when the other two might still be in danger. 

Allura sighed, putting her hands on the controls and focusing; the lion hummed to life, getting up stiffly and making a straight, simple flight to the hangar.


	15. I'm on the run from the thief I let into my head

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith isn't handling what happened well at all; fortunately Pidge speaks paranoid cynic, and Red is making efforts to herd has well. It isn't stopping Coran from worrying.

He was back on the surface of the rocky planet; Pidge hadn’t shown up. There was nothing he could do; Shiro faded out, Red wasn’t responding, God only knew where the others were, and he was alone on a godforsaken rock, curled up next to a campfire with Shiro’s corpse. There wasn’t anything left to try to keep himself together for; everything he’d clawed for and fought for, and he finally truly had nothing left, on a barren rock galaxies away from anything or anyone he might’ve known. 

He was curled into a ball against Black’s claw sobbing when the lion moved, pulling back and standing up as if waiting for something; Shiro’s armor clattered to the ground and he nearly lost balance losing the support, looking up in confusion. 

There were the lights of ships making atmospheric entry overhead, but it wasn’t one light of the right size; it was a couple lights maybe three times the size of the Castle, and a scattered swarm of smaller ones, the burning shapes forming familiar sillhouettes. 

Two, maybe three battlecruisers, and their attendant storm of fighters, with some other smaller dropship of an unfamiliar configuration coming down. 

He wedged his helmet back on, getting to his feet unsteadily, bayard activated and shield brought up on his other wrist. He wasn’t going to make it, but he was going to die fighting and take as many of them with him as he could. 

The few drones that stepped out of the dropship first had weapons trained on him; he charged, carving through three of them before he was shield-checked off his feet and thrown back a few yards, almost losing his grip on his bayard. 

Zarkon’s attention felt more like drowning this time; he’d barely managed to hold out long enough for a rescue fighting with Red, and now he was scrambling to get back to his feet, small, vulnerable, and alone, looking up at dark red armor and glowing violet eyes. 

“Did you really think you could escape me?” 

He set his stance, trying to stay steady with his shield raised between them; he was exhausted, still blinking tears out of his eyes, his chest ached, there’d been no rest since before the fight with the Druid, and he was having a hard time just keeping his footing together. 

Nothing left but to die fighting; he charged Zarkon in a head-on lunge. 

Zarkon batted him aside effortlessly with the larger energy shield, sending a charge through it that was like running into an electric fence; he hit the ground again hard. Before he could struggle to get back up, the pressure over the relay weighted down in a command he didn’t have the strength to fight anymore; he couldn’t move.

“I came here to claim what is mine by right.” 

He could hear the Black Lion rumble, waking back up, heavy metal footsteps passing out of his view to stand by the dropship. 

“And you are _mine_ twice over.” Zarkon bent down to pick him up by the back collar of his armor; he still couldn’t move, helpless and dangling like a scruffed kitten.

Then he was suddenly and sharply cold, wet, and flailing to sit up in the middle of the floor in the infirmary. 

Pidge was standing over him, hair a mess, glasses barely on straight, and holding one of the cleaning buckets. “Keith, I know these last few days have been Hell, but no.” 

He stared up, probably not looking any better; of course it was a nightmare, and he’d probably woken her up with it. “…Thanks.” He went boneless leaning against the center console; he hadn’t really wanted to see where that was going, and he was still having a hard time shaking off the weight of grief, despair, and sheer hopelessness of it. 

Pidge dropped the bucket and flopped down heavily next to him, curling up against him. “Ugh, you’re all cold and wet.”

“I wonder why.”

“You look like shit.”

He only grumbled in response; there was a faint growl to it at first, and he had to put actual thought into stifling it for the first time in years. Pidge didn’t seem to notice, at least. 

“I’d say I can’t believe you tried to fight Zarkon by yourself, but… well, it’s you.” 

“There wasn’t a whole lot of choice there.” If he hadn’t, or had tried to retreat, Zarkon would’ve been able to get to the Black Lion, and everything would’ve been over. 

Pidge went quiet; he stood up, half-balanced and stiff, peeling off his wet jacket, shirt, and gloves. They’d taken the brunt of Pidge dumping the bucket on him; he wasn’t going to bother with his jeans, not with Pidge in the room and them not entirely soaked. There was a spread of water out from where he was sitting across the middle of the infirmary, making a thin puddle. He got up, long enough to dig one of the wall panels for blankets, finding something thick, fluffy, and bigger. 

Pidge had gotten up to follow behind him; he was considering going somewhere else, but kept both wanting to keep track of Shiro and trying not to think too hard about how bad off Shiro was. 

“If you want to stay in here… I kinda wanted to talk to you about things, and this is as good a place as any.” 

He nodded, finally walking over to sit on one of the less-open sides of Shiro’s tube with the blanket wrapped around him; Pidge shrank down, half-watching worriedly before she sat down next to him, burrowing under the blanket and shoving her glasses to slide them off a few feet away. He had an unsure moment, but he was too tired to argue and it wasn’t really that uncomfortable. 

“It looks like you guys went through Hell after we got split up.”

He half-nodded with a noncommittal noise. The ‘excitement’ part passed quickly enough, but the entire ordeal was mostly just bleak. “Where did you end up?”

“Some kind of old junkyard or wreckage. It wasn’t that bad; there were these little fuzzy caterpillar things that were friendly, and they and Green helped me make a locator beacon for Allura and Coran.” 

“At least someone had an okay trip.” The atmosphere had been breathable, that was about all he could really say for the place. 

She curled up, leaning on his shoulder. “…So what happened, back there?”

“We crashed a mile or two from each other. Shiro got ambushed by some kind of local predators not long after he got out of Black; he was bad off enough from that injury that I had to fight them off of him before we could get a camp together.” He still didn’t want to talk about emergency-piloting Black.

“I mean before that. I know they did something that broke up Voltron, and… I guess I hadn’t noticed how much everybody else is just ‘there’ in the background until it got weird and quiet. I didn’t have a lot of time to pay attention to much besides the hordes of battlecruisers, but you seemed like you were close enough to figure out what he did.” 

Of course it hadn’t been as blatant to someone who didn’t get Zarkon’s direct attention; before Keith had turned around to keep Black out of Zarkon’s reach, he hadn’t figured out what it was either, beyond some vague sense of malice and everything going muffled. “Zarkon overrode Shiro.”

There was an uncertain pause. “…He what?” It was quiet, the sound of someone pulling back from an answer, not complete shock.

“Did you hear anything from the lions before we went in?”

Pidge made a quiet little uncomfortable noise. “…Yeah. Alfor’s voice, and - someone else.”

“I think the other one was Lance’s predecessor…the lions were trying to warn us.” The way the mural in the tomb was drawn, he’d always read the ‘Sky Warrior’s’ death as a lunge the enemy had read well enough to sidestep and thrust into, but from the memory, it had probably been an intentional ‘failure’. Zarkon couldn’t dig in their head if they were dead.

“Then -…” She trailed off, and he felt her wrap hands around his wrist and hand under the blanket. “You’re saying he didn’t force his way in…he was there before we were.” 

“It was hard not to figure out when I was staring down Shiro’s bayard with him talking in my head.” 

She twisted a little, raising an eyebrow to look up at him. “Wait wait. I know he was beating the shit out of Red out there, I didn’t get a _good_ look because battlecruisers, but - _that was a bayard_?”

“Coran actually told me once that our predecessors could change the shape of them at will. I got a demonstration.” 

“But - if he was the Black Paladin, Allura and Coran _had_ to know. Why didn’t they tell us?” 

Keith shook his head. “I don’t know. …Did you ever get the feeling they were hiding something whenever they talked about the previous Paladins?”

“I-“ Pidge paused. “…Sometimes. I kept thinking it was just… you know, these were people they knew who all died and it wasn’t that long ago to them…and maybe that _is_ part of it, but…”

Pidge did have a point that genuinely not wanting to talk about it with people they were still getting familiar with was probably part of it, but that would cover things like telling stories, not ‘by the way, Zarkon might be able to shut Shiro out of the relay and take over’. “They practically gift-wrapped us - we were completely unprepared and Zarkon knew it.” 

It’d been going on all along, too; he was willing to bet it was what Kythylian Mu had been hassling Coran about, too. 

“Are you going to talk to them about it?” She was unsure; there was no way it wasn’t going to turn into a confrontation. 

He glared off at the wall, and it was taking real effort to stop himself from growling. “…When everyone’s here. We need to make sure Lance and Hunk are okay before we start a fight like that, and Shiro _needs_ to be there for it.” He wasn’t sure if it was more so that Shiro would be included as the person the most at risk from it, or so that Shiro could keep him from losing his temper.

“I don’t think they meant to screw us over.” She squeezed his wrist. He had another moment of forcing down the growl that wanted to happen. “Look, they’ve got problems, but they’re not idiots tactically, right?” 

He nodded. 

“We’re around 98% of their firepower and ability to defend themselves right now. If anything happens to us, they’re fucked, and they have nowhere to go that’d hold for very long at all. Sure, we don’t know our way around the universe and can’t get very far individually, but we could potentially do something crazy like hijack some other ship if we had to. Battlecruisers are 2/3 drones and automated, if we can deal with the Galra crew, Hunk and I could hotwire the ship and the control systems for the drones. We know there’s other people in the universe that hate Zarkon enough to jump at the chance to do something if we give them some cover-fire and help them get resources, too. It’d be hard, but we could make it without them, and the reverse… doesn’t really work. Not caring about what happens to us would be suicide for them.” 

He sank into the blanket a little himself, still glaring at the wall; he couldn’t really find any flaws in her reasoning, even if it wasn’t making the betrayed feeling sting any less.

“Not saying they didn’t fuck up pretty bad… just that I’m pretty sure that’s all it was.”

“Easier to say when you weren’t the one with Zarkon laughing in your head when he realized you hadn’t known he could get in there.”

“Yeah, now think about how thrilled he’d be if this caused enough of a fight to make us all easier targets.” She elbowed his ribs gently. “How bad did he chew on you?”

Keith just made a quiet frustrated noise, hunching into the blanket without answering. He was still half expecting to feel Zarkon tugging on the back of his mind if he relaxed too much.

Pidge settled curled up against him with a frown, yawning after a minute. “Man, I haven’t had more than catnaps and you don’t look like you’ve slept since before the Galactic Hub.”

“I haven’t really.” He’d dozed off sitting in the infirmary worrying over Shiro, and was pretty sure he hadn’t been out that long before Pidge woke him up. 

“Well, they’re still trying to pinpoint where Lance and Hunk are in this area of space. It’s not like we’ve got anywhere to be.” She sounded like she was already halfway to dozing off herself, and was settled where it’d take a struggle to pull away. 

“Mmm.” He was unhappy, but she was right about exhaustion. 

She fell asleep before he did, but it probably wasn’t by a huge margin. The nightmares didn’t go away, although they were more disjointed and fragmented, too garbled for anything clearer than a sense of helpless unease and vague terror, with glowing violet eyes and Zarkon’s voice echoing through it. 

He woke up slowly, curled up on the floor around Pidge as if she were an oversized plushie, with the blanket turned into a messy pile. Pidge was asleep on his arm, drowsy-mumbling occasionally; it took her a few more minutes to start showing signs of waking up.

There was a minute of tired fumbling; Keith tried to sit up and ended up half picking Pidge up as she seemed determined to not move yet, getting a disgruntled sleepy noise before she grudgingly sat up herself, rubbing her eyes.

She kept the blanket stubbornly when he stood up, only questionably awake. His coat and shirt were damp wads; probably not worth putting back on. He stuffed his damp gloves into his pockets, the rest of it wadded under one arm.

“I need to go deal with laundry, get a shower, and find something to wear until my stuff’s clean.” 

Pidge mumbled with a nod; they’d all had to deal with finding stray Altaean spares and bothering Coran to figure out how basic routines on the castle worked, however much everyone still favored what they had from Earth. 

Then, before he made it to do the door, she looked up. “You alright?” It was the first coherent thing out of her that morning, or whatever passed for it in space. 

“Yeah.” About as well as he could be; he did feel better for having slept, even if he still felt halfway like the walking dead. 

She raised an eyebrow, but let him go.

He didn’t know how the thing built into the wall worked for cleaning clothes, but it seemed to also mitigate wear and tear some, and sent things to one of the storage panels in their respective rooms; it hadn’t mixed up whose clothes belonged to who yet, at least that he knew of. He’d overheard Hunk and Lance once wondering what would happen if one of them dumped both their things in at once, but didn’t know if they’d actually tried. 

He did hope they’d landed somewhere safe. The entire hallway felt empty, with them missing, Shiro in the cryotube, and only him and Pidge of the Paladins.

He went tiredly through the shower, preoccupied. It was easy to forget Coran’s continual assurances that they had barely scratched the surface of what they should be able to do when they were terrorizing battlecruisers, but they really were still fumbling beginners, with a long way to go before they’d hold a candle to their predecessors. They had barely gotten out with their lives, and wouldn’t have had that much if the barrier hadn’t gone down. 

He found drinking water and a stray overshirt that vaguely fit, then struck out into the halls, heading to upper floors. They didn’t really bother with keeping lighting on all of those decks, and some of them didn’t even have the lights set to come up automatically with movement. He probably could have turned some of them on as he went, but there didn’t seem to be much point to bothering when he was only passing through. It was dark, but there was just enough minor track lighting to get around. 

There were a couple of doors on an upper deck that were a little tall and the only ones on that side of a long, curved stretch of hallway. It was unusual enough to pique curiosity, and it wasn’t locked or shut down; the doors opened onto a long, round area that had to take up a decent portion of that deck of the castle. It was dark, with benches and recessed sitting areas spread out along it, the far wall blank and featureless, made of some kind of translucent dark material. 

He put a hand on the panel by the door; instead of lights coming on, the far wall shimmered to life, turning into a solid starscape. There was an unfamiliar planet visible, as if the Castle were orbiting it; a projection of some other part of space. 

It was quiet, peaceful, and didn’t feel quite as unnervingly empty as the lower floors they lived on. He slid into one of the recessed couches, watching the simulated star field go by. 

The planet below looked like a gas giant, huge and multicolored-mottled. There were visible masses of structures and lights in its upper atmosphere, inhabited floating areas that were too big to call mere cities; some of the arcologies looked big enough to cover most of an Earth continent. Arcing sweeps of artificial stations and structures curled around it in intricate curves and lines, with ships of all shapes and sizes moving through them.

Some of it was reminiscent of the image of old Altaea that had flickered across the screen when the corrupted AI was manipulating Allura, but it was mostly basic under structure of parts of it and a few features here and there. He didn’t recognize large parts of the architecture or most of the ships at all, but here and there he could pick out materials or angles that looked Galra, and some of the ships were definitely Galra design sensibilities, if mostly not any familiar configuration - civilian ships.

A formation passed around one of the outer artificial rings, of three ships; one that had the sort of white curving angles of the castle with two longer outer pillars rather than the four that held the Lions’ hangars, larger than the castle, one similar size to the other two that was gold and green and intricately unfamiliar, and one that was half the size of a battlecruiser but already had a similar build and basic underlying design to what they’d been facing. 

He slid down onto one of the curved couches, not looking away from the simulation; it almost looked like he could walk off the edge of the deck and out into space.

It had to be a real place; a glimpse of over ten thousand years ago. If any of the arcologies still existed, they would be worlds different now, large parts of it probably destroyed or rebuilt to bury non-Galra influences. 

It was hard not to feel small and insignificant watching it. Humans probably hadn’t figured out cultivating crops even at the height of this place. It was a single world in a single solar system; the ten thousand year old map the Castle had covered hundreds of galaxies made of billions of stars and systems each, and Zarkon’s Empire had probably pushed the boundaries of that since.

_I remember when your ancestors were still mastering banging rocks together._

He curled up on the couch, pulling his knees up to bury his face in. He hadn’t stood a chance, and wasn’t sure how much it would’ve helped to have any of the others involved in that fight rather than preoccupied with battlecruisers and their own rescue runs.

Red leaned in, a sense of warmth and pressure; the lion still felt a little creaky and off, but was at least decently recovered. He tried to focus on that, turning the flame into a security blanket; it didn’t really lessen the raw nerves and half-scraped-out feeling or the sense of something shifted, but it was something, at least.

The door opened. He desperately wanted it to be Pidge, even though he knew somehow that it wasn’t.

“Are you alright?” Coran’s voice was quiet; worried and vaguely guilt-laden. 

“What do you think.” He and Red had been beaten down hard, they’d walked into Zarkon’s claws, he’d had Zarkon rifling in his head, Shiro almost died, they didn’t know yet what had happened to Hunk and Lance, and Coran had been the one with some kind of opening to say something on their way in.

Coran walked around to the sloped opening of the sitting area he was in, carefully giving a few feet distance. He set down a bowl within Keith’s reach, and retreated to sit on the edge of the couch. 

Keith moved just enough to be able to see; Coran was continuing the tradition of swapping out the green seaweed-goo for the off-white fake bland soy-mash whenever he ambushed Keith to remind him to eat. 

“I should have said something sooner.” Coran kept looking away from him.

He stared at the bowl for a minute; he wasn’t sure if he was hungry or not, but he also couldn’t remember when he’d last eaten. He hooked it with a hand, tugging it over to curl around it, not looking at Coran. “Yeah. You should have.” 

Pidge had a point, but it being a slip on Coran’s part didn’t really help as much as it should have; it didn’t really change what had happened, and he’d been through plenty of shit that shouldn’t have happened before on misunderstandings and mistakes. ‘Should have’ never undid anything.

He wanted to be snarling more over it, or trying to get away, but he knew better; not while they needed to find Lance and Hunk, and not while Shiro was still bad off. 

Coran rubbed the back of his head. “I - well, I suppose there really isn’t much excuse on my part; I wasn’t at my best but still should have been thinking more.” 

Keith mostly ignored him; it wasn’t that hard, as he was realizing he was starving and that meant he could just focus on eating. 

“I am sorry to have put you all through that without warning you - and you and Shiro especially, for what happened. We weren’t trying to make things worse-”

He hissed through clenched teeth with the effort it took to not growl. “Coran _I don’t want to talk about it_. Save it for Shiro.”

Coran took a deep breath and nodded, getting up to leave; there was a pause in the sound of footsteps at the door before it opened.

Red was nudging him as he finished eating. After Coran had left and the cornered-feeling anger had time to burn out, he did feel like that probably hadn’t been the best reaction - and felt a little bad for having lashed out at Coran when the man was obviously rattled himself - but there wasn’t much else coming to mind; he still felt like a knot of raw nerves that still hadn’t untangled since somewhere before they attacked the command center.

He dropped the bowl and silver off at the kitchen, and headed down to the hangar, to stay in Red’s cockpit for a while. Some of the tension eased as Red settled back standing, the sense of flames closing around him accompanied by an audible rumbling purr.

He draped sideways over the pilot’s seat, resisting the brief temptation to curl up under the console. Everything muted down to that room; he half-dozed for a little while. Red seemed to be recovering better than he was.

And Red was watching him, well aware there was a lot wrong and waiting.

“So right now Shiro is the only thing keeping Zarkon from just taking over if we get close.” 

It apparently wasn’t quite how things worked, but wasn’t far off either; there were limits to Zarkon’s influence and it would be difficult for him if they weren’t cooperating. 

He also knew what they’d been trying to do to Shiro and had caught the implication with the first monster that they’d scathed out and converted a person into that thing; querying Red if they could use something like that to turn him or one of the others into something more easily controllable without destroying their ability to function with the lions got a lot of uncertainty - Red didn’t know.

“And until Shiro can fend Zarkon off on his own, we need to look out for him.”

Agreement.

“How are we supposed to do that when we can’t protect ourselves even?” Zarkon had almost gotten into his head enough to start rearranging things, and may have managed a little of that even; Red corrected that to less than he was afraid of and more than he understood, but whatever was attached was a mix of things that didn’t make sense and things he didn’t want to think about. 

There was something Red was tracing out in his head; a pattern like foundations for walls. It would interfere with coordinating with the others and was impossible to use as anything but a cooperative shell while the lions were gathered as Voltron, but it was something to push back with - although Red was unsure how well it would work if Shiro wasn’t interfering with Zarkon using the relay. 

Zarkon didn’t have the personal connection to any of them that Shiro or the others in the group did, but he had a strong enough and old enough connection to the Black Lion, with enough experience in how to navigate it, that the lack of direct ties wouldn’t slow him down that much - as Keith had seen firsthand. 

Red was confident they could learn enough to be able to fend Zarkon off; he wasn't so sure. 

He considered asking again - about the knife and if Red knew what he was - but the possible answer was terrifying enough to make him feel queasy; he didn’t want Zarkon to be right about him. Red was definitely watching that, but gave no answer either way, just pensively biding time.

He didn’t want an answer on if this was what she’d meant about him not being ready to deal with it, either. 

His hands didn’t have claws. His teeth were normal. He wasn’t going to think about how long he’d had sharp teeth in his dreams; there had to be other alien races with those. 

Eventually he left the cockpit, still feeling chewed up and uneasy but less immediately on edge. 

He was half-aimless, considering whether or not he felt up to taking frustrations out on the training drones, when Allura found him. She kept a respectful distance, hands folded in front of her, and kept the space between them when he looked over warily. 

“We’ve picked up on a beacon and I confirmed the Blue and Yellow Lions’ signatures near it; we should be arriving soon.” 

Which meant Lance and Hunk were probably okay; he sighed in relief. “Thanks.” 

She turned to head for the bridge; he made a circle of the halls there before heading that way himself, to lurk by the wall.


	16. We are your prayers engulfed in sorrow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team stops to collect Hunk and Lance. Allura isn't going to leave without at least an attempt at proper diplomatic introductions and alliances with their new friends. 
> 
> Friends whose recent history involves a Hell of a lot of fridge horror and "That's a Hell of a mess to work on detangling, including drastic changes to the planetary environment" for a lighter-toned episode. 
> 
> Which means a little bit of time spent underwater, and Keith utterly out of his comfort zone environmentally.

The beacon came from under an ocean covered by a layer of ice. Lance’s voice came over the communicators as soon as they were entering the atmosphere, in high spirits. “Hey Princess! You’ll never believe what happened - you need to come down here, we’ve got some new friends! And don’t worry, they've got this coral stuff that makes it so you can all breathe okay. Just come out in your armor first.”

Keith didn’t think he’d heard Lance that happy in a while. 

The castle broke through the ice where there were impact fractures that probably marked Blue and Yellow’s crash site. It maneuvered well underwater, but as soon as they were under the ice, Keith felt uneasy, Red in the back of his mind like a cat being shoved into a bath. 

He’d lived almost his entire life in deserts, and Red was a fire creature. He knew how to swim, barely, because it had been a required part of survival training and because of a few attempts at lessons as a kid. Being deep enough underwater for it to be like low gravity environments didn’t really help much; it was also deep enough to be aware of the immense amount of water they were under. 

The drop pod airlock let the pod flood before the outer door opened; he followed the other three out in resignation while Coran made a few happy laps around the pod, humming over the radios. Pidge was paddling out in awe of the rock formations, coral, and large water plants; Keith stuck close behind Allura. 

Lance and Hunk arrived fast enough, riding giant sea horses and accompanied by a couple of large mercreatures, one slimmer swimming between the two Paladins. Keith was beginning to ponder how hard he’d hit his head back on the barren planet and if he was awake at all. The larger ones were leading five more of the seahorse creatures.

Lance had told their new allies to account for everyone, including Shiro.

“Princess Allura, this is Plaxum, newly appointed advisor to Queen Luxio.” Lance bowed theatrically, with a sweeping gesture to the mermaid. 

Plaxum swam forward to just in front of Allura. “It is my pleasure to meet you -“ She paused, scanning the group, almost visibly doing the mental math.

Hunk and Lance caught it in almost the same beat, Hunk suddenly pulling his seahorse forward, intensely worried. “Where’s Shiro?” 

“In the infirmary.” Keith motioned back at the ship, almost throwing his balance off in the water; it was one of the more annoying differences between underwater and zero gravity. 

Coran swam to tread water and brake neatly next to Allura, turning more serious. “He’ll be fine, but he needs a few more quintents; we barely made it in time.”

“So…he’s okay?” Hunk’s attention was on Coran, tuning out everyone else. 

Coran nodded. “Good as new soon enough.”

Hunk gave a sigh of relief inside his bubble, almost leaning forward enough that the seahorse started drifting, uncertain what he wanted. 

Plaxum looked between them in concern. “Is it alright for you to be leaving your ship unattended?”

Allura looked to Coran, who shrugged, unconcerned.

“It’s difficult to get on board the Castle, and even if someone succeeded, the security systems would alert us. The infirmary is also nearly inaccessible if one is not recognized by the system properly.” Which probably meant her, Coran, and them, something that Keith took as a comfort. 

Plaxum nodded, and swam back to lead the guards forward with the other seahorses. 

The seahorse was much easier to deal with than swimming and using thrusters himself; the guards gave a general set of pointers on commands, and it was enough to adapt having been around horses to the alien animals. It didn’t work entirely, and he had to factor in three dimensions of potential movement, but it was still an improvement. 

It didn’t hurt that they were pretty clearly trained for simple travel tasks and not anything complicated. The horse he’d been handed when he’d gotten into jousts was a cutting horse trained for herding and trick riding the rest of the year, and shifting weight wrong with that one would mean the horse was halfway to New Mexico, with or without the rider. 

Partway to the town, he concluded that Loki was worlds harder to handle and adjust to than the weird alien seahorse, three dimensions or no. 

He was among the lead of the group when they reached the castle and he reined in the seahorse, staring at the entrance.

And he was the last to get off, with the realization that he was going to have to go back to swimming. Pidge seemed to be doing okay, Allura and Coran were comfortable, Lance almost seemed more at home than he did on solid ground, and Hunk was making it look easy. 

He slid out of the saddle, with a little too much reflex of being used to gravity and solid ground, and ended up off-balance and trying to steer a drift. He was trailing last as they entered the queen’s castle, half relying on his armor’s thrusters on low output.

And Lance was looking back occasionally, confusion turning into trying not to laugh turning into snickering; he very nearly flipped Lance off before he remembered that they were surrounded by royal guard and a royal advisor, about to meet a queen, and Paladins Were Supposed To Be Diplomats.

“I thought swimming was a part of survival training”, Lance tossed back quietly.

“I lived. Almost. My _entire life_. In _deserts_. I am not a frigging dolphin like you.” 

Allura and Coran were both watching them, Coran with an eyebrow raised, Allura giving them a warning look. Plaxum looked between them, lifted a hand, then just shook her head and watched. 

“Here, lemme give you a hand.” Lance turned easily, curving back; he was in his element and he knew it.

Keith almost lost his coordination for going forward, shoulders hunching as he actually tripped over trying to speak for a second to force himself not to growl. “I don’t need your help.” 

Lance stopped and paddled back, raising both hands. Allura sighed and cleared her throat. Keith took a moment to breathe; he’d be awkward, but he’d manage to keep up as best he could, and a diplomatic meeting underwater _was_ thoroughly Lance’s show, not his. He just needed to keep quiet and deal. 

There was a lot of activity in the throne room, the mercreatures coming and going every which way. In the center of it there was a large carved shell being used as a table with several of them clustered around it that seemed to be staying put, carrying on a focused conversation with spurts of one of them turning to carry on a short, animated conversation with another coming in from the sides or above. 

The bowl of the shell seemed to hold a map, with carved markers mimicking the bowl area the town was in, with some of them tethered and floating. 

They stopped to wait near the gathering, Allura in front, Plaxum staying beside her with hands folded. From what he caught of the frantic planning, there was some kind of massive reorganization going on, with talk of rebuilding cultivation of some of the plants and algaes and expanding hunting and herding of schools. The entire group was mostly deferring to one with lighter markings in the center.

“I think we have a start, at least - does everyone understand their part?”

Most of the gathering made some kind of salute and then scattered, leaving the Queen in the center, drifting tiredly for a beat before she swam in a curve over the map. 

“You must be Princess Allura. I am Queen Luxio; Lance and Hunk have told us much about you and the others.” Luxio made a curving gesture that was probably an aquatic attempt at a bow; Allura returned it.

“It is our pleasure to meet you, your highness. I hope we aren’t interrupting anything important.”

Luxio shook her head. “Most that needs immediate attention has been handled; we may be rebuilding for some time, but it is thanks to your Paladins that we have our lives and our freedom to do so.”

Apparently safe wasn’t quite the word for it, but they’d been fine and accomplished something while they were separated. It was a relief, after worrying about what might have happened to them. 

It was mostly Allura and Lance from there, as Luxio and Plaxum recounted their recent history and Lance and Hunk bringing down the alien creature that had been feeding on them. Allura was clearly mulling something over, and began asking questions about the thermal vents that’d been blocked and how long it would take Luxio’s people to undo the damage the Baku had done to force dependence. 

“Let us help, then. The lions should be able to undo some of the worst of it in a few day’s time, with far less hardship on everyone.”

Luxio stared in shock. “We couldn’t - you have your own mission, and we couldn’t possibly impose on you further!”

“It would be no imposition. We don’t dare seek out another battle until until all of the Paladins are recovered, and we couldn’t possibly leave in good conscience with something yet we could do to help your people.”

He’d be thankful for something to do to take his mind off worrying about Shiro if he didn’t suspect he’d be the odd one out; Red was as happy with the idea of a lot of activity underwater as he was. 

“I take it I’m staying here?”

“Actually no.” Allura looked back over her shoulder. “The others might be better suited to the larger part of the digging, but the Red Lion’s resistance to heat might help depending on the vents themselves.”

He hoped she realized the resigned misery came from both him and Red. At a stifled snerk from Lance, he shot a glare at the other Paladin on the side of the shell.

“Oh come on, we finally found something you’re not good at. Give me this.” Lance was trying to be quiet, but he was pretty sure Plaxum and the Queen both heard it anyway, Plaxum barely succeeding at not laughing while Luxio only side-glanced and pretended she didn’t hear it.

“You’ll have to forgive us; they’re still young and new to their posts.” Allura’s smile had that faint strain that promised murder later if there was any further squabbling. 

Red actually roused from sulking at having to work underwater for a moment of amusement at Allura’s worry; if Lance and Hunk had built a solid foundation being themselves, then they probably didn’t need to worry about strict formality with Luxio. 

And as for their predecessors, there was a brief flicker of Alfor fighting to keep a straight face and not look sideways at some kind of commotion off to the side. He was standing next to Zarkon, who was pointedly focusing on the alien dignitary they were talking and calmly acting as if the others weren’t there.

Apparently Allura was sadly mistaken if she thought idiotic Paladin shenanigans were just a symptom of youth and inexperience.

“There is nothing to forgive - they have more than earned our trust.” 

There was a brief period of Luxio and Allura going over the map of the area; there was more damage to the vents than they could undo even within a few days, but it was concluded that they could still save potentially years of work by focusing on a couple major ones near the town. 

And Luxio’s attendants half ambushing all of them with the “bubble coral”, leading to Keith balking at taking his helmet off underwater until Allura shot him a Significant Look.

It was mercifully expected that they’d be going between Luxio’s palace and the Castle by seahorse when not in the lions; Pidge and Hunk were keeping themselves occupied discussing modifications to the armor for dealing with aquatic environments and how to make it easily convertible so they wouldn’t get in the way the rest of the time. 

Red was better at maneuvering underwater than he was. That didn’t mean Red enjoyed it at all. The lion kept up with the other three, and was going to do the job, but wanted to go back to the hangar and not move until they were somewhere sensible and not-underwater. Lance and Blue were literally swimming rings around everyone else, making loops every possible direction. 

“I could stay here forever” came over the radio, dreamy and content.

“Can he?”

“Keith!”, Allura warned, and glared at him on the comm panel with a frustrated groan.

“I think someone’s jealous~”, Lance sing-songed.

“LANCE!” Allura looked like she was getting a headache. “We are dealing with a diplomatic situation, can you two stop acting like _children_ for three ticks?!”

“That’s a pretty tall order with Lance.” Pidge, at least, was boredly unconcerned with it. “The Queen survived a couple days with Lance mostly unsupervised already anyway, I think if he was going to offend her, it would’ve already happened.”

“You wound me, Pidge. But seriously, she’s right; they’re not that uptight here. You can relax a little, Princess.” While Lance was talking, Blue swept close over Yellow, tapping the top of the other lion’s head with one paw. 

Allura sighed. “I suppose you’re right.” It wasn’t the first time they’d been in some kind of diplomatic situation, but their contact with Arus had been haphazard and he remembered her grumble about her father making it look easy. Allura had been there and involved in the emergency on the Balmera, and while the merfolk were pre-industrial, they were familiar with dealing with interstellar travelers, and they were meeting Luxio on something closer to even footing right on the heels of a few days of condensed nightmares and things going wrong.

The vent had a mass of rock collapsed over it, cutting it off from the rest of the ocean. Cutting a hole in that was a joint effort, Yellow pulling up a chunk of rock large enough for Red to slip under; as soon as there was an opening there was a burst of hot water from below. The others balked at going close to it, while Keith barely needed to nudge controls for Red to be ready to go. 

It was probably close to a mineral-laden pressure cooker, but it didn’t even impact Red’s temperature shielding enough for the cockpit to get warm. Several many-legged things and masses of tentacles and fronds scuttled away from the lion’s lights, some of them easily two or three times human size. 

His job was simple; there’d be joint work carving off chunks of rock, Red would knock them up and help the pressure and shift in currents along, and Yellow would move the pieces away from the vent. Red was less uncomfortable practically swimming in the vent than she had been otherwise, although it apparently only registered to the lion as “warmer than the rest of the ocean”. 

Red was apparently capable, at full power, of passing through stellar coronas unharmed, and was pretty sure they had vastly overestimated how much it would bother the others. They may not all be as built for heat, but they were made for the kinds of extreme temperatures that existed in space.

It occurred to him that space was infinitely colder than an ocean and Red was fine with that. Red gave a disgruntled echo of a different shade of his own discomfort with being under that much water. 

It got mind numbing after a while, just busy enough to not entirely be alone with his thoughts but not enough to distract from how empty the bits of bored radio chatter going on were without Shiro. From the occasional awkward silences after something he’d have probably commented on, Keith wasn’t the only one bothered by it.

Hours later, as Hunk tossed the last significant chunk away, the other three circled the vent, staring down at Red, who was in no hurry to go back to the colder water. 

“Good job, team, let’s go home.” Pidge managed about the best impression of Shiro she could. 

The comm went dead silent, the lions still, and there was an echo of miserable worry that made it take effort for Keith to tell what was his and what was everyone else’s; he guessed the pang of ‘if we’d gotten there faster’ came from Hunk, and the overwhelmed almost panicky feeling of not being up to handling things and not knowing what to do probably had a feedback loop between him and Lance, while Pidge was probably the source of ‘can’t lose anyone else like that’.

“…sorry. It’s just…there’s been so much missing. It was too quiet.” 

There wasn’t an answer on the comms, the lions turning to head back to the castle. 

Everything was still subdued by the time they got back to Luxio’s castle for the evening, even though their greeting was jubilant. Plaxum circled Lance close, tail curving around without making contact. “What’s wrong? Did something happen?”

“Uh - no. It’s just… we’ve split up before but never been really down one like this, yanno? And Shiro’s our leader.”

“Not the first time”, Keith corrected, “You were just the unconscious one before.”

Lance turned to stare back at him, caught off guard; Hunk and Pidge both just gave him a shared weary look and nodded. 

Plaxum flagged, some of her fins flattening back. “Ah…”. She looked away. “It’s only a little longer, though, right?” She rested hands on Lance’s shoulders, then circled the entire group. “And he’ll be back soon.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Lance smiled weakly.

She was right, even if the close call made it easy to lose sight of that. Another few days and Shiro would be fine.

Luxio and one of the others were nearby at the end of the hallway. Plaxum stopped partway in between, looking back at them. “You’re all so lucky to have each other.”

The other mer at the end of the hallway shrank. The Queen looked lost, then half-guilt-stricken. The guards in the hallway seemed to share the mix of confusion and vague guilt. 

There was some kind of story there, and a strong feeling Lance knew it and wasn’t saying it. Allura glanced sideways to them, noticed Lance’s odd uncomfortable pause, and stayed quiet, letting him field whatever had just happened. “Yeah, we are aren’t we?” Lance was already shoving things aside and scrabbling for his usual cheer. “It’s been a little rough lately. We didn’t mean to bring the mood down like that.”

Luxio smiled distantly. “It’s alright. We do not begrudge you your hardships.” She motioned to follow her; Keith was starting to suspect the amount of open space had less to do with design and more to do with depopulation. If the thing Lance and Hunk had killed had cut off most of their sources of food and drastically altered the environment, then it was likely there weren’t more than small pockets elsewhere; they’d probably averted an extinction event at the last possible second, and were now dealing with the aftermath of something as bleak for the locals as the Balmera’s near collapse. 

She led around to a smaller room that had been grown into a large table with curves and points to help secure things. There was a spread of food; some of it was legible as meat or fish, algae and seaweed based dishes, others he wasn’t really sure on. It was also spread out sparse. “I do apologize for being unable to show full hospitality. The Baku made us dependent on it, and while we remember how to hunt and gather, our crops and shoals were abandoned and scattered. The palace is on minimal rations until the people are better supported.”

Allura nodded soberly. “We are far from offended, your majesty. Our people must always come first.”

Keith stuck to the meat where he could; he’d had enough of anything seaweed like for three lifetimes, even if it was real and the work of someone competent enough to keep Hunk happy. Most of the conversation over the table was less dire, Luxio recounting what she remembered of previous visitors and asking after stories about their homes, while Plaxum and Blubthump stayed mostly quiet save for an occasional story about the outlying areas of ocean. Lance, Hunk, and Pidge were happy to field most of the questions about home, even if Lance’s remembered homesickness could have taken its own seat or two.

Luxio seemed to notice that their stories of places they’d seen in their travels had gaps as large as the ones the other two Mers were keeping, but didn’t comment. 

Keith had gone through half of the meal avoiding attention and just letting everyone else talk, until a lull where the Queen’s attention moved to him. “Are you from the same world?” She made a subtle gesture indicating the other three humans. 

He blinked, caught off guard. “…Yeah. Not the same area, though; I spent most of my life in the desert. It’s kind of the opposite of here.” 

She laughed lightly. “I’ve heard stories of desert regions from other worlds; it’s not a foreign concept.” Plaxum and Blubthump were paying more attention; the Queen noted their interest with a beat. “Well, to me at least.” 

“Uh.” He was stuck in the position of getting to explain a desert to a couple of aquatics that were still apparently wrapping their heads around the concept of land-based environments. “Well, it’s a lot of sand and clay, with very little water. There’s usually only small pools and streams that you might not be able to find if you don’t know where to look; it’s dry and hot. Things grow there, but it’s mostly either thick or built to hold its own water, or it’s brown and dry and dead-looking most of the year; a lot of plants have thorns and spines to ward off anything trying to eat them. Most of the animals only come out at night, when it’s cooler. For a few weeks every year, it rains non-stop; low ground floods, and everything that looks dead and brown for the rest of the year turns green and spreads.” He didn’t have a lot of strong attachment to Earth, but it’d been peaceful out there most of the time; it was comfortable and familiar, and he did miss it sometimes, even if not enough for any strong desire to turn around and go back. 

“How terrifying”, Blubthump muttered, then seemed to realize it was audible to everyone. Keith could only shrug; it _would_ be a lethal environment for someone like them. Luxio shook her head with a sad, fond smile, leaving him to his awkward recovery of pretending he hadn’t said anything. 

Hell, it was a lethal environment for a lot of humans; he’d been a very caustic rescue and temporary babysitter for a few hikers, hitchhikers, and other idiots who he’d found struggling with heatstroke or dehydration. 

When he was going back to eating, Luxio let him go; even Coran had gone quiet, and Allura had been listening to them talk about home, distantly wistful. 

“Are you alright, Princess?”

Allura froze, startling out of her reverie. “I’m…quite alright, your majesty. Sorry to worry you.” 

“You seem to be beyond mere homesickness - if it is not discourteous to ask.” 

Lance shifted, looking away and getting preoccupied with his food; Keith tried to follow suit and not pay attention. Pidge and Hunk shared a look and both shrank down a little. 

“…No, it is quite alright. I - we do miss our home, but we can’t return to it; it was destroyed, long ago.” Allura almost leaned on the table, throwing off her balance in the water. “Coran and I are all that’s left of our people. We’ve gathered the Paladins and set out in the hopes that we might prevent more tragedies like Altaea from occurring.” 

Plaxum drifted closer, resting a hand over Allura’s. “You’re already succeeding.” 

Plaxum hadn’t been controlled; most of the other mers had noted hazy memories of their time under the Baku’s control, if anything at all - she would be one of the few that remembered what had been going on while it had power clearly. 

Allura smiled weakly. “Thank you.” 

“What was your world like?” 

Luxio winced at Plaxum’s earnest question, glancing to Allura as if offering a rescue; Allura raised her other hand to wave it off. “It was a beautiful place, with vast oceans and life everywhere. I traveled with my father and mother, but we returned there often. There were coastal jungles that had every color imaginable, underwater towns surrounded by all manner of sea life, crimson deserts and mountain peaks and valleys that bloomed like paintings in the spring. Some of the cities were easily thousands of years old, with towers of silver and crystal curled around ancient stone and painted murals. I remember the last year we could return, borrowing an old overcoat to sneak out onto the upper balconies of the old palace and watch the fenmrui come out to fly in the rain, catching the glowing water-flies…” 

She trailed off; Coran was quiet and pensive next to her, and Plaxum was staying close. Luxio kept still.

“What happened?”, Plaxum asked gently.

“Zarkon destroyed it long ago, when he began his empire - and anywhere else my people had any presence.” Allura shook her head, then noticed the quizzical look she was getting from Luxio, who had apparently started attempting mental math. “…My father put Coran and I in cryo-sleep, and hid us on a fringe world so that we would survive no matter what. The Paladins woke us.” 

“I know that we are something of an isolated oasis; before the Baku, we heard occasional stories of the Galra empire and their leader, but…” Luxio trailed off, looking away. 

Allura sat straighter, schooling her expression. “It would be wise to be cautious of your beacon, your majesty, at least until we can break more of Zarkon’s stranglehold. The Galra have turned nearly all of the known universe into a mass of bloody cruelty, killing worlds and slaughtering or enslaving entire species. They’ve been a blight on the stars since the beginning of the Empire, and their outer border has crept closer to this region of space; I don’t want to think of what they might do if they turned their attention to your people.” 

There was a faint, self-conscious sense of dread in the back of Keith’s mind; he’d never argued with the vehemence of Allura’s vendetta, if anything, he’d probably helped feed it. Considering how much she lost and how deep that betrayal ran, she had every reason to be a mess over it, and turning around to fight was probably the most productive response she had to that much pain; he could barely imagine carrying that much weight and not breaking under it. All they’d seen so far did little to argue against it; whatever the Galra had been once that Alfor had trusted, Zarkon had taken ten thousand years of pains to mold them into something else. Still, even though he knew trusting Zarkon on anything was a mistake and that Zarkon would probably say or do anything to try to undermine them, he was having a hard time banishing Zarkon’s moment of amused recognition from his mind. He wasn’t sure if he was more afraid of Allura’s reaction if Zarkon was right, or just of the possibility of being one of the creatures responsible for everything awful that happened to them.

And Luxio’s people were particularly vulnerable; they wouldn’t stand a chance if they caught Galra attention.

Luxio nodded soberly. “We’ll be careful.” 

There was silence for a few beats, then Lance leaned on the table, somehow managing to make it look natural underwater, staring pointedly at Coran.

“Hey Coran. About those rains of burning sharp rocks and boiling acid seas you were telling me about…” 

Coran coughed, making an exaggerated show of looking away innocently; Allura blinked, startled out of the dire mood, and turned to stare at him, taking a couple visible seconds to connect dots on which subject Lance had waited to comment on. “What have you been telling them, Coran?!” 

“Oh, just a few stories that maaay have been a little embellished….” He almost reached to fidget with his moustache, stopping short of the bubble. Allura mouthed a few words at him Keith couldn’t make out that probably would've expanded the team's vocabulary of Altaean swearing. “We used to do it all the time when there were new crewmembers - you know, make a game of seeing how much they’d believe!” 

She stared at Coran in growing disbelief, making a couple of confused hand gestures at him. The two younger merfolk were laughing behind their hands; Hunk rolled his eyes and shook his head. “I told you he was pulling your leg. The only way they’d be comfortable in the same kind of conditions _we’re_ comfortable in is if their homeworld would be easily habitable for _us_.” 

Pidge nodded in agreement; it was apparently a continuation of a conversation that’d already been ongoing. 

Lance stared at Coran in mock-offense, finally raising his hands to clap slowly. “Well played, Coran, well played.” 

Keith didn’t doubt that Lance’s timing with that had been entirely intentional.

**********************

He was left trying to sleep underwater, something that wasn’t working out very well. The best he was managing were broken catnaps; it wasn’t very restful, but it was at least hard to have nightmares when you weren’t sleeping deeply. 

It meant he was awake when there was a sudden commotion down the hallway, Coran hurrying through the rooms they were staying in at an impressive pace. “We’ve got an emergency! All hands on seashell! Get moving everyone!”

He made enough noise to get the attention of the guard posted for the night, one of whom darted off; it didn’t take long for all of them to gather, and Luxio and Plaxum had almost appeared out of nowhere at an impressive speed.

“It looks like Allura was too right about that beacon for anyone’s good. The Castle’s sensors have picked up on a Galra battlecruiser nearing the system.” 

Luxio was silent, frozen in the water.

Allura made a quiet, growling groan. “We can defend ourselves better than they can - we need to lead them away.” 

They’d been taking on battlecruisers individually; Keith narrowed his eyes. “We can take it out, even with just the four of us.” 

Coran shook his head. “If they see four of you, they’ll know we can’t form Voltron right now.” 

“But if the Castle takes a shot at them and then runs, they might just think we’re all still scattered and it’s just you two.” Pidge was half upside down, seemingly intentionally, as she didn’t seem perturbed by it. 

“Better they think we have less and get caught off guard, than realize what we lack and plan to take advantage of it”, Allura said simply. 

Pidge nodded. Keith was almost uncomfortably reminded of Pidge’s earlier explanation and how it hinged on the Altaeans not being tactically stupid; they _weren’t_ , even if they were harried, occasionally disoriented, and under a ridiculous amount of pressure. 

Allura straightened, paddling to turn to the mermaid queen. “Queen Luxio. I’m afraid we need to take our leave, and I’m not sure when we can return; if we linger we’ll only put your people in more danger. Will everything be alright?” 

Luxio nodded. “We will rebuild and restore our world. Hopefully one day we may be able to properly honor your aid, with all of your team present.” She swam forward to put her hands on Allura’s shoulders. “Take care of your people, however few they may be, Princess. They are the most precious thing you have.” 

It was louder in a half-empty city that might be all that remained. 

Allura nodded; Plaxum darted off, vanishing in a blur. They were met at the palace entrance by guards with seahorses; Keith near-reflexively aimed for seeing what the mount could do, and ended up slightly regretting it, as water pressure at its sprint pace was a lot worse than wind on a horse or bike. Apparently whatever shift of weight went with fighting to stay seated doubled as a signal for the seahorse to slow down to a pace he could handle - in time for Lance, Coran, and Allura to shoot past him on their mounts. 

He made it to the castle behind Pidge and about even with Hunk, who was hurrying but not interested in the attempt at sprint-running the ride back. 

They launched as soon as Coran and Allura reached the bridge, bringing up shields and aiming to pass within a stone’s throw of the battlecruiser; Allura ordered them into their hangars in case the ruse went bad, sending them off the bridge.

This led to sitting in Red’s cockpit, waiting and watching the comm feed of the bridge; Red was tensed and ready to move around him. 

“Coran, lower shields to fifty percent, engine output to seventy percent, and keep two-thirds of the weapon banks on cooldown.” 

The ship audibly powered down around them. Red’s presence stilled in the back of his mind, like a coiled spring held down. 

Allura was playing bait, making the castle look more wounded than it was. 

“They’re launching fighters; we’ve got incoming!” 

Red brought up a tactical display and tapped into the Castle’s sensors, showing the swarm of incoming fighters; the castle took out a handful even with the weapons mostly powered down, and then the volley from the swarm hit the shields; the lights in the hangar flickered as the Castle struggled to avoid damage with the shields still powered down. 

“We can’t do that for very long, Princess…” 

“Just lure them to the edge of the system; increase shields to sixty percent.” 

The trading fire continued; the Castle was winning out over the fighters, slowly.

“…Aaand they’re charging the ion cannon.” Coran was not enjoying the game of chicken they were playing. 

Red’s hangar was still closed; she wasn’t trying to launch yet, waiting for either a signal or something more severe to go wrong.

The display showed the canon charging; Allura counted out down to the last second. “ENGINES FULL!”

The Castle suddenly rocketed out of the path of the blast; the battlecruiser and its remaining fighters turned to give chase, powering after. 

They drug the cruiser and its fighters a decent distance into empty space outside the system, marking a clear arc of direction, before Allura finally called a wormhole out, short-range and making every effort to make as much trackable noise as possible; she led through two more short jumps before going back to trying to avoid being traced, setting another jump long enough to get out of the cruiser’s reach. 

He relaxed in the cockpit as Red let go of the tension in his head; they weren’t going to be needed after all.

His armor was still dripping as he walked out of the hangar to get it off and stowed so he could sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did kinda spend a while looking between Coran's quip about the burning rocks, and the way Allura talks about Altaea, the image of it in Crystal Venom, and the images in her flashbacks, and... well...
> 
> I don't think Coran was the most reliable narrator when he was trying to help Lance's mood; he definitely had a period he doesn't seem to have outgrown where he had a lot in common with Lance, after all, and they both will do ridiculous things when everyone else is getting too serious or morbid. 
> 
> Also seeing what you can get new people to fall for is a long, proud military tradition I have stories of from my own relatives. ~~At least Lance can't be sent to the supply depot for increasingly ridiculous made-up components, and would probably have caught being sent for "fallopian tube" for Jeep windshield wipers WAY faster than the poor guy that my father pranked...~~


	17. Now I finally see your face - it's just a mirror staring back at me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last chapter before Shiro gets back! Now that there aren't any distractions Keith is stuck tripping back into his regularly scheduled fallout of traumatic experience + existential crisis + existing magazine section of issues that were jarred by all of the above. 
> 
> "Moodier than usual" is noticeable enough for Lance and Pidge to make their own separate attempts at checking on what's wrong, with varying degrees of success, Coran has not given up on being Team Dad, and Red has a Talk with Keith sorting some of what he's dealing with.

He went back to his room to get decent sleep, and failed soundly at that. Now that they were back in space, away from any distractions, there wasn't anything to keep his mind off everything gnawing on it. His dreams were fragmented nightmares in fitful, broken sleep, haunted by violet eyes and a presence like a black hole given teeth and claws, Zarkon’s voice still echoing in his head whenever he half-woke, the memory of it lingering well after.

Facing Zarkon on foot, with Zarkon batting him around like a cat toy before pinning him, not even allowing the escape of death. Red, refusing to recognize him and turning weapons on him.

_They don’t know what you are._

Shiro recoiling away, afraid of him. Trying to close distance, hearing the warning whine of the prosthetic a half moment too late before half his chest was carved open without even a flicker of recognition. 

_Do you think they would allow you so close if they did?_

Allura pinning him to a wall by his collar hard enough to set his teeth rattling, snarling and calling him a monster; throwing him out on some barren planetoid, alone. The light of the wormhole barely fading out as it closed behind the Castle before other ships appeared, Zarkon there as if he’d been waiting for it to happen, knowing he had nowhere else to turn and nothing left.

The Castle falling again, unexpectedly surrounded and invaded when it should have been safe, Zarkon on the bridge in a ring of familiar corpses with Shiro beaten down and on his knees.

Dreams where he wore a Galra uniform, where he knelt to Zarkon willingly, where his face in the mirror had featureless gold eyes, purple fur, and pointed ears. 

_You fight like a Galra._

Every time he woke up he had to take time to check with Red that they were still out of range, that it had just been his own subconscious and not some kind of abuse of the relay or Zarkon having found a way to keep a hand on him no matter the distance. He still wasn’t sure even with Red’s assurances; if there was some mark that wasn’t directly using the relay, would Red know? Could Zarkon infect one of them the way the Galra crystal had infected the castle?

_You can be broken._

Was the running thread about his own identity an idea Zarkon had planted, or merely Zarkon drawing attention to something that’d always been there, hoping to exploit it? 

He stayed sprawled in his bed, trying to search his memory for things to disprove it from before the fight, things Zarkon wouldn’t have had a chance to touch, all the little tells that he grew up with that told him he wasn’t human, and only kept running into the opposite. He finally resorted to pulling up his phone, sifting through the copies of his medical records.

He couldn't follow enough to tell anything one way or another about the long list of neurological anomalies, but he’d had to mind what he ate, and they’d never quite figured out what was wrong with him there besides some kind of genetic failure in his digestive system; when he managed to set up living in the shack and wasn’t dependent on other people deciding what he was eating, he’d fallen into living mostly off game hunting, some foraging, and a narrow range of cooked vegetables - and felt better than he had for most of his childhood for it. There were anomalies in his eyes and on the outer layers of his eyes that didn’t interfere with vision and hadn’t developed enough to be more than footnotes with questionmarks on more thorough optical exams. 

A history of anomalies that all too easily pointed to his nonhuman heritage being some kind of large, probably nocturnal carnivore. 

He’d had sharp teeth in his dreams as long as he could remember, sometimes claws. His violent reflex reactions as a child had confused therapists - none of his other patterns should have caused that degree of violent response, it was incredibly situational, they’d actually checked him for PTSD and a few other disorders because of it with most of the screening coming up negative. He didn't have a problem with it under normal circumstances, but if he was stressed, afraid, upset or in pain enough, he had clawed and bitten, growling and snarling; it’d earned him years of being called ‘werewolf’ in among the other bullying. 

The bay doors on the hangar Sendak had kept Red in. The hangar in the Balmera where the console hadn’t done anything for Lance. 

The conspiracy theories he’d shaken Shiro over suddenly had new and horrifying relevance. Galra tech only recognized Galra or things they had made, like the drones and Shiro’s arm. He’d not even known to question it when he’d hit the cargo doors on Sendak’s ship to free Red, or when he’d closed the hangar bay on the Balmera. Had Lance thought to question it? Lance was the only one who’d seen him do it, after all, and Lance had been there when Pidge pointed out that Shiro _should_ be the only one of them capable of that. 

And one of the most prevalent theories for a less benevolent species creating a hybrid that could pass for human was infiltration.

 _Was_ he some lost experiment of theirs? A weapon Zarkon had lost track of somewhere? There may not’ve been much interest in humans yet, but the tomb meant they might have had clues that one of the Lions was there. 

_I came here to claim what is mine by right. And you are **mine** twice over._

For once, Keith wanted to see if Shiro would accept someone else ghosting into his room because of nightmares, except Shiro still wasn’t there. Even if he could’ve gotten into Shiro’s empty room, it being empty would have probably been worse, and he didn’t want to explain to anyone else why he didn’t want to sleep in a room alone. He hauled a pillow and his jacket down to the cryobay, curling up next to the tube on the ground to sleep.

It didn’t help as much as he’d hoped. His sleep was still restless at best, broken up by continuing fragments of nightmares. 

_Lance’s bayard was faster to ready than any firearm Earth had. They’d both been raised with the Twenty Foot Rule for the range where a melee weapon could close distance and do damage too fast to ready and fire a gun; the Altaean weapon cut that in half to ten feet, but the castle’s grid of hallways were narrow and tightly laid enough to get around it. He could maneuver that way in ambush and easily strike from well within the weapon’s effective ready range, and Lance wasn’t near as good at close range as he was. Even if paladin’s armor bought some time it wasn’t enough to stop another bayard in the hands of someone determined enough; what would’ve taken Lance’s hand off without the armor still cut deep enough to make his dominant hand useless. Lance staggered back with a cry of pain, the bayard dropping to the ground and deactivating; he lunged, driving the blade through Lance’s breastplate -_

“Keith? ….Are… you okay?”

He started awake, shifting fast to use the cryotube for cover on reflex, staying low. It took a few seconds to process Lance’s shoes and Lance’s increasingly ratty jeans, blinking blearily as he followed up; Lance was carrying a bin of cleaning supplies in a minor miracle that was probably an excuse to check on Shiro. 

“I’m fine. It’s nothing.” He drew up sitting next to the tube, pulling one knee to his chest, trying to shake off the nightmare. He suddenly wanted to be far away from Lance, too rattled to deal with figuring out how to talk to Lance and feeling vaguely queasy with himself, not having a lot of luck at driving the image out of his mind of the betrayed, horrified shock on Lance’s face in the nightmare, blood dripping down Keith’s bayard.

Lance raised a dubious eyebrow. “Right. Fine.” He set the bin down, tapping the panel in the floor to bring up one of the other tubes. “So how is he?”

“Same as earlier. No alerts or anything, at least.” He didn’t want to leave the infirmary; it was as close as he could get to leaning on Shiro for now. He was trying to stay calm, voice level and detached. 

Lance stole a worried glance back at Shiro’s tube, then cleaned in silence for a while; Keith was drowsing, not quite able to get back to sleep with Lance in the room. 

“So… you two knew each other pretty well before all this?” Lance was trying to be about as casual as he could under the circumstances; it came out intensely awkward. 

Keith shifted with the pillow, turning his back to Lance and trying to ignore the question; Lance leaned to look around the tube, eyes narrowing. 

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Lance glared at him, gesturing at him with the rag. “Look, you’re not the only one worried here, okay? You don’t need to get all territorial at me.” 

Keith turned enough to glare over his shoulder. “That’s not it.” He couldn’t say that it hadn’t been before; Lance was lucky he’d been too preoccupied back on Earth with Shiro being alive and there to react to Lance’s insistence on trying to take over saving Shiro. 

He almost wished that it still was territoriality, not jarred nerves, nightmares he didn’t want to talk about, and existential fears he definitely didn’t want anyone to know about. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to talk about Zarkon’s implication he might be Galra with Shiro even, after everything they’d done to Shiro, nevermind anyone else he was less comfortable with. 

“Then what is it?” Lance leaned on the half-open tube he’d been cleaning, gesturing with the rag. “I’m not a mind-reader, yanno.”

Keith rolled his eyes. “Maybe if you payed more attention you would be.” He was quietly thankful that Lance seemed to be the worst of them at picking up on the relay, but he was also bracing to have Pidge or Hunk tracking him down to fuss at him over the nightmares. 

“The fuck is that supposed to mean?!” Lance was visibly bristling, shoulder hunched and the rag held in a fist; he _was_ insecure about his connections in general. 

“You think Coran and Allura tried to put us through all that lesson about mental links, no secrets, and staying focused for fun?” He leaned around the tube just enough to glare back, using it as a derail. 

Lance had about three things almost-said, mouth working while he squinted to make sense of that, resisting the implications. “You mean we could like…actively dig in each other’s heads? Not just stuff like the dreams and that one time with Shiro?” There was a half beat. “That’s kinda creepy.” Lance was already staring at him deeply uncomfortably, now that his attention had be drug to the basic loss of privacy and boundaries it implied. 

“That’s how I knew about Pidge. Might be how Hunk knew, too, I don’t know.” He resettled with his pillow and jacket. “It’s not my fault you haven’t figured out how to listen to it.” 

“That’s because some of us expect people to use their words like grown ups rather than be creepers rifling in other people’s brains without telling them!” He’d succeeded at pushing Lance’s buttons enough to get him uncomfortable and upset, and he wasn’t sure if he’d been even intending to or not. 

He stood up, picking up the pillow to stalk out. “Whatever. I’m going somewhere else to sleep.”

Lance was grumbling in Spanish as he left, and he was pretty sure it wasn’t much but a string of expletives; anything that wasn’t profanity, concepts without an equivalent in a language he knew, or proper names seemed to get translated anymore. He got halfway back to his room, then turned and headed for the hangar, curling up between Red’s claws.

Before trailing off, he ran through following the shielding Red had shown him, trying to wind the lines around the nightmares and anything associated with Zarkon getting in his head and his possible heritage. Blocking the others out might normally do more harm than good, but this was not something he wanted unexpectedly overheard.

He didn’t sleep well at all, even if the nightmares were a little dampened. He woke up with a blanket draped over him and one of the mechanical storage boxes that were here and there on the Castle next to him; there was a sturdy, padded hammock and bedding for it in the box, along with a note in Altaean in what he was pretty sure was Coran’s handwriting. The hammock had a couple of locking mechanisms for attaching it to metal walls. 

He leaned on Red for help with the note; it sorted out into a general idea, with the lingering sense that there were things the Lion remembered that weren’t incredibly important attached to the concepts. According to Red, there was another hammock like it in a panel somewhere in the cockpit area for long trips, and their predecessors had been just as prone to occasionally sleeping in the cockpit of their respective Lions on a bad night. Coran had found him asleep and brought one, just in case.

The image of Zarkon sleeping in the hangar or in Black’s cockpit was an odd side effect of Coran’s note. 

Even with the occasional hints they’d dropped about something going wrong with the old Paladins, they’d also spent a great deal of time emphasizing that much of the previous Paladins’ strength came from working as one unit with absolute trust in each other. He wasn’t sure if the flicker that they’d gotten when Allura had been moving Black back on the barren planet came from Allura making contact with the relay, or Black’s memory of its time with Zarkon; either way, it had been something with no sign of discomfort or worry, no sign of Zarkon having anything more sinister in mind than indulging a child, and Alfor had trusted Zarkon enough to leave Allura alone with him. 

Zarkon, and likely the other Paladins, had been family, enough for Allura to sneak up on him with flower crowns and curl up next to him as a child. 

He doubted Coran or Allura were ready to answer what had happened to drive a wedge into that, and he was still stinging and not sure he’d be rational about the subject after the Altaeans had gone to such lengths to avoid them knowing Zarkon had been the Black Paladin; not when he was still having nightmares whenever he fell asleep and could still almost hear Zarkon’s voice in his head, feel mental claws digging into him. 

Red’s response to asking what had happened was a complicated tangle that he couldn’t make sense of yet; there was a sense of mourning to it, a sorrow for what had once been. A hundred tiny hairline fractures, things held back and misread, smaller arguments and clashes that hadn’t seemed threatening until some kind of solid catastrophe - or a few such - had hit all of those weak points, shattering the trust that had held their predecessors together like glass in a bomb blast. 

Coran’s reaction to their bickering suddenly came into stark focus; Lance’s distorted image of him with echoes of more than one voice snapping insults and accusations that were thoroughly believed and meant, Zarkon snarling at Alfor as a ‘fool’. There was a secondhand impression of Zarkon somewhere during the breakdown, a ball of extended claws and wounded rage, lashing out at anything in his path, seeing everything as a threat to be put down, any appeal to compassion or conscience an attempt at getting past his guard, any attempt at reaching out to help as a lie and a trap; a need to be in absolute control, to allow nothing else any kind of power over him.

He curled up in the hammock; for a moment, he was unsure why Red had picked him if Red had seen that and could look inside his head to see all of his own paranoid jags and how much he could see echoes in himself, tiny seedling versions of the mistrust and paranoia that he still wasn't sure how to get out of or tell when they were wrong or right.

If Shiro hadn’t been there for him, if something had happened to Shiro at the wrong time, if Lance had pushed a little harder or not cared about hitting nerves, if DHS hadn’t snarled his paperwork between states enough for him to vanish into the desert where he had some control over his situation while attending the Garrison before he aged out of the system, if there’d been a few more foster placements that’d been actively harmful rather than just confused, alarmed, and incompetent or unprepared, if he hadn’t had a few short passes with vaguely more helpful therapists or Shiro leaning on him about his own reactions until he learned to be a little self-aware of his own snarls and learned to actually think about where others were coming from…

He could trace a few too many ways that he could’ve become the Zarkon that had killed Alfor already; paths where the Zarkon he’d fought, the Zarkon that treated everything around him as an object, a possession, or a problem to be disposed of, could’ve been his future. 

He knew from the dreams that Red had an eye on him long before he’d set foot on that battlecruiser; before he’d chalked up Red refusing to let him in at first as ‘temperamental and hard to handle’, basic symptoms of Red being what she was.

Now it made a sudden larger amount of sense, sense that Red affirmed. He had walked into the hangar making demands, expecting obedience and wanting to keep control as much as possible.

_Kneel and serve or die._

If he hadn’t let go of that to ask her for help instead, if he hadn’t shown some capacity for accepting being helpless and trusting something outside himself, Red would have let him die there, to wait for someone else who wouldn’t repeat old mistakes.

The lion purred, audible in the hangar, and there was the mental pressure and warmth in his mind of Red leaning on him. Zarkon had that choice in the past, starting small and falling deeper and deeper into no longer accepting the alternative as an option that would even enter his mind. Keith was still capable of it, enough to dig his way back up rather than falling into the same hole. 

Red’s grief came as much, if not more, from his predecessor as the lion - “the Paladin’s life force mirrored in their lion”, a lingering imprint; grief for what the Paladins had been before that trust had shattered, and more specific mourning for who Zarkon had once been, the loss of a dear friend and trusted companion. 

He was dozing restlessly in the hammock when he started out of it to sudden, sharp squeaking; he opened his eyes to find Plachu on the hammock, maybe a couple inches from his nose, staring at him.

Pidge was standing beside the hammock, a bowl in hand; it was apparently made half from the seaweed goo with layers of other things in it, but there were signs of serious work put into making it less…

What it was. 

“Hunk’s kind of got his hands full so he told me to deliver this.” She held it over. “He terrorized Coran into teaching him which symbols on the dispenser meant something would be dangerous for us. Neither of us know what half of this is or which species it’d be meant for, though, so uh, good luck.” 

He sat up to take the bowl, staring at it dumbly for a minute. “Uh. Thanks?”

She shifted weight, adjusting her glasses, folding her arms, and fidgeted with her sleeves, arms still folded. “So. Uh. How are you doing with the whole.” She unfolded her arms, making a vague rolling gesture in the air. “Shoving pieces back into place in your head….because of Zarkon being an asshole…thing.” 

He stared at the bowl again, for different reasons. “…A little better. I think.” He still felt raw, like Zarkon could pull a thread at any minute and start talking in his head again, and was forgetting he didn’t have claws with alarming regularity, but there was a basically nonexistent amount of it that he actually wanted to talk about, even if he did appreciate the reminders that people did notice something was wrong when he was less actively rattled.

Hell, he could at least give Lance credit for trying now that he wasn’t in the room and on edge.

“…Right. Well, that’s good at least, I guess.” She frowned, studying him with brows furrowed. “I … haven’t said anything to the others about that yet. I’m not sure how to, and - it’d…probably blow up pretty fast. You’re probably right about waiting for Shiro.” 

He poked at the bowl experimentally; it couldn’t be that bad, really, and he trusted Hunk experimenting more than he did Coran. 

“I…should go help Hunk or something.” She shuffled her feet, then turned and walked out of the hangar, stopping partway to the door for a moment to look back.

He curled up in the hammock so he could rest against it and still sit up enough to eat; it wasn’t great, but Hunk’s attempts at rifling through whatever spices he could find were worth something, and it was a marked improvement over the normal goo by itself. There was probably only so much one could do with turning a mess of synthetics all meant for different species into something like a seven-layer dip. 

Plachu curled up on the magnetic clamp that held the hammock up, nose twitching and watching him. 

He got about halfway through the bowl before he finally acknowledged the mouse with more than sideways glances. “Yes, I am still mad about that.” 

Plachu sat up, squeaking, head tilted.

“I know they weren’t trying to screw us over. I don’t know why they did it, and I don’t think I’m in any kind of place to _care_ yet.” 

He went back to eating, the mouse leaning over the edge of the clamp to stare at him, eyes narrowed.

“Look, whatever the reason was, it happened. They didn’t tell us, we were completely caught off guard, and we _all_ almost died. Shiro’s half-dead in the infirmary and I don’t really want to talk about what I went through.” He motioned at the mouse with the spoon, jabbing the air. “And I’m not _going_ to talk about it until Shiro’s there, because he’s the one hurt the worst by it, and I don’t think either of them _want_ me to talk about it right now.” 

Plachu tilted his head the other way, ears angled oddly, and heaved a large sigh for something that tiny before jumping off the clamp and running out of the room. He finished eating, leaving the bowl setting on the ground near Red’s claws, and moved the hammock into the cockpit.

Some of the nightmares muted, and he did sleep better; Zarkon’s looming presence quieted, he wasn’t dreaming of killing the others or Imperial uniforms.

Instead the dreams drifted more into having more Galra features than human in the mirror, with varying degrees of distress. It was hard on waking up to think about the image and not see Sendak and Zarkon reflected in the alien face in those dreams. 

He knew what being able to work the Galra consoles meant, but he still wanted to pull away from it, vaguely nauseous. He missed the days when being confused he didn’t have claws was a distracted thought that happened when he was half-asleep, rather than something to regularly get thrown off by whenever he caught sight of his hands.


	18. This is the road to ruin and we're starting at the end

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hunk and Keith get a lesson about some of the alien bioscanners that's not great for Keith's nerves. 
> 
> Shiro gets fussed over and then turns around to corral Keith now that he's recovered enough to do something.
> 
> And Lance puts a few pieces together and manages to completely throw off one of the busted bits of Keith's worldview.

Keith was hovering in the infirmary again when the door opened; Coran froze when he looked back, waiting and watching for his reaction.

He sighed, folding his arms with his back to Coran, and focused his attention on Shiro. Coran was the one running the infirmary; he still wasn’t happy with the Altaeans, but he wasn’t going to put Shiro at risk over it.

While Coran was running checks, worry won out over wounded anger and mistrust. Shiro was more important to him than the rest of it, and Red was leaning in a little again he didn’t have to be happy with things, but she was nudging him to remember their earlier exchange; there was something the lions knew about it that wasn’t translating when Red tried to relay from one of the others.

“…How is he?” The dark marks under the bodysuit from the wound were missing.

“Much better. It shouldn’t be too much longer.” There was a continual faint beeping and chirping as Coran was working on the console. “He’ll be fine.”

Keith frowned. He’d caught enough through this to know that the infirmary cycle for healing was a different process from the long term stasis of cryosleep. Shiro hadn’t had any nightmares bleeding over on the relay, but Keith had also been having plenty of his own, and wouldn’t know if his own had drowned them out. “He gets some pretty vivid nightmares, after everything the Galra did to him. Will that…”. He nodded to Shiro in the tube.

Coran paused what he was doing, pensively frowning at the screens. “Well, we have precious little to go on for human nervous systems and biology, and I’m hardly a medic. I’m working off a lot of triage and general emergency training for mixed-species groups, guesswork, and relying on the Castle’s systems.” He waved a hand at the console. “Brains and nervous systems are complicated things, and anything that involves them and some of the more fussy equilibriums they interact with is more than I want to guesswork at. Honestly, if we had at least a proper medic and more information on humans as a species, we’d have already been trying to help stabilize that, but…”, Coran shrugged helplessly. 

Coran was an engineer, not a neurobiologist or psychiatrist, and hedging bets was probably safer for Shiro. 

“Yeah. Probably better not to mess with it, then.”

“Well, we can’t do much long term, but some of what feeds into that has to be temporarily stabilized for the healing process to function properly. I doubt it will be enough for any lasting effect on causes, but it should be heavily blunted at least while he’s in there.” 

He let out a breath in relief. Some respite was better than nothing. 

He went quiet, eventually tuning out Coran working in the background. It was little enough time that he could pretty easily just stay in the infirmary until Shiro was awake. 

He didn’t really want to wander out; it was hard not to worry and Shiro in a sort of medical coma was unsettling, but he was getting more unnerved by being out in the Castle. Nothing had felt right about anything since the Galactic Hub; having Shiro back would at least be a large push towards setting things…

Maybe not right, but less wrong. The next time Shiro talked about ‘if anything happened to him’, Keith deeply wanted to start shaking him about what it was like without him temporarily, because he doubted Shiro grasped how much of a half-functional shitshow they had all been without him.

The door opened again, and he started, stiffening as he looked back, then relaxing again when it was just Hunk. 

Hunk wandered over to look over Coran’s shoulder, and seemed to be doing his own restless-worry wander; after a while staring at the display and actually trying to make sense of it, Hunk pointed at some sensor readout. “What’s _that_?” 

Keith leaned back to look, but couldn’t see from where he was; he had to walk around to stand near Hunk, behind Coran, to see what Hunk was pointing at.

“It’s a monitor for internal quintessence”, Coran commented idly; it looked like if someone had tried to do some kind of three dimensional scan of the location of all blood in the body, only if all the vessels and cells were diffuse and not entirely distinct, with a bunch of different color patterns and Altaean labels. A lot of it was a sort of neutral reddish-beige; that faded out sharply on the prosthetic arm, replaced by odd dark-to-vivid-neon violet. Threads of that ran from the arm outward, intermingled like roots. There were some faint streaks of a barely lighter dark-to-vivid-neon-violet that looked unnervingly like what had been infecting the wound, and intermingled spread throughout was a dark, shifting purple-indigo that seemed to blur and blend with the “normal”, tinting areas of it darker. He could pretty well guess that there was whatever power the arm generated and used when it was in active weapon mode, the remnants of the infection, and…

He wasn’t sure. Hunk was studying it, rubbing his chin in thought.

“What’s all of this darker color?” Keith pointed at where one of the larger streaks of the darkest patterns was more easily distinguishable.

“That’s from the Black Lion. The Paladin’s essence is mirrored in their lion and vice versa; the longer and stronger the bond between them, the more their energy intermingles back and forth. It’s been contributing to fighting off that curse, and he’d have been in there far longer without it.” Coran sounded pleased with it. 

Hunk leaned in, fascinated. “So how much can scanners like this read?”

“Depending on the sensitivity, quite a lot. A proper medic could read interactions between energetic and physical health from this enough to use this scanner as a secondary gauge for diagnostics and severity, while the Castle’s security system uses a less detailed bioscanner capable of distinguishing individuals and major influences; when you lot arrived and walked in, it detected Lance’s connection with the Blue Lion to identify him as one of the new paladins. There’s also variations in the internal quintessence of different species; the Galra ships and more involved technology of theirs we’ve dealt with have a basic form that allows for a minimum baseline of locking out other races.” 

Keith was suddenly deeply glad he’d never been injured enough to need one of the infirmary pods. 

Hunk tapped the side of his face with one finger as he thought. “Could we get our armor to spoof a Galra biosignature somehow?” 

Coran frowned. “More difficult than you’d think, since scanners generally work via interacting with the diffuse ambient background fields, so the blockage to keep it from reading your actual essence would be noticeable interference, while the fake signature would be shallow enough to not read properly. Setting up something like a password crack so that someone with a compatible basic signature would be mistaken in the system for a different individual is possible but difficult; that’s essentially what Pidge was trying to do for Shiro back at the Hub.” 

Which meant no way to explain away how he’d managed to work the hangar Sendak was keeping Red in, or the hangar on the Balmera. Another worry crept in, but he didn’t want to ask Coran about the armor’s sensors for how suspicious it might look. Besides, if there were something in the armor’s biometric scanners that would tip off him not being entirely the same species as the others, particularly with the odds of that nonhuman part being Galra, Coran probably would’ve confronted him or had more reaction by now. 

Hunk was watching the display, still half lost in thought for a while. “…So does this mean that all of us have the thing with our lion’s energy?” 

“Yes! In fact I think I could show you.” Coran was cheerful; Keith froze. He did not want to end up being the example, not when it would probably make things he didn’t want known visible, but he also wasn’t sure how to tap out on that without sounding suspicious. Coran brought up one of the other pods, the lights blinking differently than usual, and put a hand on Hunk’s shoulder to nudge. “Here, I have it set to just run a scan; don’t worry, it won’t even close on you.” 

He let out the breath he’d held when he froze. Hunk was perfectly happy to go along with the demonstration, standing in the center of the pod and waiting. 

Coran brought up a second screen, tapping something in; the pod chirped for a moment, the lights going steady; Hunk got an odd expression, blinking. “That kinda tingled.”

The second screen brought up a static readout a little less detailed than the one that was still monitoring Shiro. “Alright, all ready.” Coran motioned for Hunk to come back over.

Hunk hurried back, leaning in over Coran’s shoulder; the base background was a faint shade off from Shiro’s, with a deep gold blurring into it, not quite as extensively as the scanner showed for Shiro. “Whoah. …Hey does this mean we get some kind of magic power or something eventually?” 

Keith was slowly relaxing; his nerves were bad enough that he was happy to just exist in the area of a happy conversation that had nothing to do with him.

“Wellll…” Coran fussed with his moustache. “Hypothetically it’d be possible someday? It would partly depend on your own aptitudes and how it integrates with your system. I can’t say I have enough information to tell for sure, but humans just don’t seem to be built for much awareness even. We Altaeans are far more aware of our own quintessence and have more potential to interact with it, but ability to do much with it outside of a narrow range of rather less flashy uses is very rare outside of royal lines and usually takes a great deal of specialized training. Some things like interaction with more energetically sensitive beings and objects are entirely likely, however.”

“So I could actually talk to the Balmera the way Allura and Shay do?” Hunk’s entire expression brightened further. 

“Entirely possibly!” Coran had come out of some of his pensive distraction, turning more cheerful. “You wouldn’t happen to know how common it is for humans to show signs of sensitivity, would you?”

“Eeeeheheh…” Hunk rubbed the back of his head. “Rare enough that if you talked to a human scientist about magic they’d probably just laugh at you for being superstitious. I think Pidge is still wrapping her head around it. There’s stories and stuff, but it’s hard to tell what’s somebody actually maybe sensing something and what’s made up or something. I didn’t really believe in it either until everything that happened with Keith finding the general area of the Blue Lion by sensing it and being able to map out the Fraunhofer Line for the lion’s energy without even knowing what that was, _and_ knowing when and where Shiro would arrive out of all of that…”

Keith’s reverie of just existing broke when his name was said, and he was uncomfortably trying not to think too hard about Coran’s comment about humans not seeming to be built for it; he didn’t know how much inclination Galra had, but he knew he wasn’t a good example of “human”. Coran was just nodding and listening for most of it. 

“Basically by the time we found the Blue Lion, it was pretty obvious that Keith figuring all of that out based just on dreams and ‘weird energy’ proved that some kind of psychic ability _was_ possible and obviously very real.” 

“I’m not sure the arrival I was sensing was Shiro anymore, honestly.” He’d been getting an occasional glance from Coran through the whole thing; now he had both of their attention. “Well…I knew something was arriving around that time and that area, from some clues in the carvings and the dreams and all, but I didn’t know what. Then I got a couple messages from people with better telescopes or resources on the conspiracy boards that some kind of non-natural object was inbound, so I thought that had to be it… but Sendak’s cruiser was _right_ behind Shiro’s pod by a couple days, with Red on board, and probably heading for that same area since they seemed to be after Blue. It might’ve been pointing at Red and I just jumped the gun.” He shrugged. 

Hunk didn’t seem perturbed by it. “That’s still a whole lot that would’ve been impossible by coincidence, dude.” 

“I guess so. I knew I was being called by something.” Hunk had a point in that, at least. “There is one thing about it that bothers me, though. Those carvings and paintings were made ten thousand years ago… but the one that indicated some kind of arrival or big occurrence had a night sky where I could use the arrangement of stars and planets to narrow it down within a few days. I thought something would probably happen when we went out there because that painting had five indistinct figures and a ‘shooting star’ coming down, there were five figures in that tomb, and there were five of us.” He looked up from his train of thought to Coran. “How did whoever made those paintings ten thousand years ago know to predict Sendak arriving with another of the lions that precisely?”

Coran’s expression did not fill him with hope for a clear answer; there was a sort of confused awe to it as he mulled it over. “Well… Voltron as a whole, particularly the Black Lion, have some kind of connection to the fabric of space time we don’t really understand very well at all. Perhaps it was a message from the lions themselves?” He shrugged helplessly.

Hunk looked like he was having his entire awareness of reality rearranged. “…That means they knew we were coming and were waiting for us for ten thousand years.” 

“It might not’ve been us specifically. It might’ve just been - that there had to be five people who _could_ be Paladins there for things to work out or something.” Keith wasn’t sure he could wrap his head around the combination of odds and the string of other occurrences that had to happen over ten thousand years for them to be there, or that their existence and presence was predestined that far back. 

“Well, we _were_ all there, and it was a pretty ridiculous chain of events for that to happen.” Hunk was perfectly earnest about it, and absolutely right. “Kinda makes me wonder what would’ve happened if one of us missed our cue, though…” He frowned, trailing off. “I mean, you not going out chasing the weird dreams, or Shiro not escaping soon enough, or Pidge getting caught and thrown out so she couldn’t drag us out there, or…”

Coran put a hand on Hunk’s shoulder with a gentle nudge. “The important part is that it happened, and we’re all glad that it did, for everyone’s sake.” 

The conversation was interrupted by Lance and Pidge scrambling in, Allura not far behind - Shiro was close to waking up. 

They’d all clustered around Shiro when he staggered out of the pod; Hunk may have taken up the brunt of making sure Shiro didn’t fall, but all of them were reaching in to make some effort. Pidge even wedged in between Lance and Hunk, although it was hard to tell if she was trying to help him keep balance or just hugging him. Shiro’d been disoriented, but it wasn’t the sharp, tight-wound confusion that came from waking up from one of his trauma nightmares, and he relaxed quickly into the mess of attempted support and attention with a quiet smile of relief. It took a few minutes for the cluster to break up, as if everyone there was relying on the physical contact to make absolutely sure he was okay and they were all there.

It finally felt like things were falling back into place where they should be; Shiro was okay, and was more than enough to blunt his remaining bits of resentment over the lack of warning about Zarkon.

And as much as Keith wanted to bristle and still be angry about walking into Zarkon’s claws without knowing what that meant, Red batted down at him on Allura’s explanation with the query of how comfortable _any_ of them, Shiro particularly, would’ve been with the Lions if they hadn’t had time to work together without that shadow hanging over them. Red thought Allura and Coran had hedged their bets too cautious on how long they waited to say anything, and that was why Red had been trying to get it across to him well before they ended up encountering Zarkon directly, but didn’t think the Altaeans were entirely wrong, either. 

He couldn’t make any kind of good argument, and Red made a mental motion for his anger and hurt to be aimed where it belonged - at Zarkon for actually causing the injury, and Zarkon’s forces for enabling Zarkon to keep his stranglehold on the known universe. 

After they’d charted course and started the jump, the nerves and distraction eventually settled into the “hurry up and wait” lull of space travel enough for Shiro to ask what he’d missed; Keith settled at his console, not contributing much and mostly just slowly relaxing now that Shiro was back with them. Most of the answers were Pidge, Lance, and Hunk narrating their far less horrifying adventures after being split up, and Allura and Coran joining in for their time spent with the merfolk.

There were things still gnawing at him, but none of it actually seemed important enough to let intrude. 

When that hit a lull, Hunk was the first one to finally say it out loud. “Man, you have no idea how good it is to have you back.”

Shiro blinked, and actually looked caught off guard, like he hadn’t been expecting it.

“Yeah, no kidding. There’s been a lot missing - like the whole place is quiet and empty.” Pidge was draping over the side of her console.

“I… thanks. And sorry for worrying you all like-”

Hunk cut his apology off with a stern “AH-AH none of that!”; Shiro shrank down in his seat. 

“You gave us all a good panic back there - that we might have lost you, not that it was in any way something you could take blame for.” Allura had turned around, leaning back on her control pillars. 

“Right. It’s good to see you back, too, so… mission accomplished, I guess?” Shiro laughed weakly, rubbing the back of his head. 

“Let’s just never do that again, alright? We seriously need you.” And Keith looked up at Lance’s comment, giving Shiro a very pointed look that he knew Shiro saw, even if he was trying to pretend he didn’t. “We were all a mess, and Keith’s been _way_ more of an angry basket case than usual.”

He raised a hand to flip Lance off; Lance ignored it. Shiro turned to look at him, mostly more worried than vaguely disappointed, although the ‘you can do better’ disappointment was definitely there too.

Pidge tapped something out on her console’s light screen; Shiro’s made a small noise, and Keith saw some small window open on it, but couldn’t see what it was. Shiro stared at it quizzically for a beat, then there was a briefly horrified look of dawning recognition before he visibly schooled his expression neutral and gave Pidge a nod. 

Keith was starkly aware that he had far more attention from everyone on the bridge than he wanted, most of it confused and with all the warning signs of preludes to questions he didn’t want to answer. He sat up, made a few awkward gestures, then motioned to the door with a quiet, “I think I’ll just… step out for a few”, and hurried out of the room.

He just missed Shiro’s weary sigh, and Lance giving Shiro a thumbs-up when Shiro stood up and held a hand up for everyone else to stay there and let him handle it. 

Shiro caught him a hallway or two over, catching his shoulder and tugging him gently toward one of the side rooms that turned out to be some kind of meeting room; there were a set of chairs around a table that had the recessed panels for computer consoles set into it, the structures for screens covering two of the walls, with a bench along the other side. When Keith walked in further, he stayed back closer to the door, letting Keith sort out how much space he wanted. 

“You came out of that pretty bad off yourself, didn’t you.” It was calm, level, and there was a shade of guilt in Shiro’s concerned expression that he wanted to shake Shiro for. 

He leaned against the wall, folding his arms and looking away. “Not as bad as you did.” 

“It’s not a contest, Keith.” Shiro only gave a moment on that. “I know I wasn’t up to doing much before, but I’m fine now.” 

Keith scrunched his face, giving a dismissive shrug with a half-hearted gesture where he didn’t even know where it was trying to go. 

Shiro sighed and shook his head, waiting a couple seconds before trying again, more gently careful. “You gave me a pretty big scare back there.” 

There was a little bit of mental math on timing; Shiro probably saw the last part of the fight while Hunk and Allura got him to Black, before he had any ability to intervene. “I had to keep him away from the Black Lion. Everyone else was busy with the fleet.” He’d been over it a few times mentally; if he hadn’t gotten in the way, Zarkon would’ve taken the Black Lion, and if any of the others had peeled away from their fights to help him, the fleet probably would’ve either overwhelmed Coran or had their attention drawn to backing up Zarkon against him. 

And on some level he was pretty glad that nobody else got subjected to Zarkon’s direct attention over the relay. 

“I know. You did well out there; we were all unprepared and outmatched. Honestly, I think we can call it a pretty miraculous victory that we all came out alive.” 

Keith let out a breath, shoulders slumping; it had more impact than he’d been expecting, hearing that from Shiro, getting some confirmation from outside his own head. He’d gone over the events of the fight to be sure that there wasn’t anything else he could’ve done, gone into every time it’d come up prepared to defend his ‘recklessness’, all the more ready to get told off for picking a fight with Zarkon himself coming so soon after he’d gotten in over his head with the Druid. 

And for all that he’d given Shiro enough of a panic for the weight and volume of it to interrupt Zarkon, Shiro still thought he’d done something right there. 

“…Thanks.” 

“He was trying pretty hard to get to you, wasn’t he.” 

Keith nodded silently. He wasn’t sure it needed much explanation when Shiro’d been Zarkon’s first target that way.

“Anything you’re willing to talk about?”

Keith looked up, tired and a little haggard. “Do you want to talk about whatever he was digging at you with?”

Shiro grimaced and flinched, looking away. 

“Didn’t think so.” 

“Well…whatever he was picking at, he was probably just trying to pick on whatever he knew would hurt.” Shiro was still looking away.

“And was probably playing more to whatever you’re afraid of than what you actually are.” He shot Shiro a pointed look. 

Shiro nodded, and looked up just enough to meet that with the frustrated, tired knowing look. “At this point, do the details really matter for either of us?” 

Keith sank down to the bench, leaning his head back against the wall. “No. Probably not.” A lot of the jabs about having no hope of winning were probably pretty similar, he was willing to bet Shiro’d gotten picked on about being nothing but a weapon and something Zarkon had already beaten and remade, and Shiro’d probably gotten the extra added layer of Zarkon being territorial and possessive over the lion. 

Shiro carefully walked over, not settling sitting next to Keith until he was sure there hadn’t been any signs of flinching or pulling away. Keith slumped over, leaning against him. Shiro put his good hand over Keith’s shoulder, and Keith went boneless, burying his face in Shiro’s shoulder with a frustrated, broken snarl that had a little more of a rattling growl to it than he wanted to let sneak in.

Shiro didn’t seem to notice it, leaning into it and hugging Keith tightly with a little more pressure from the mechanical hand than he probably realized; Keith didn’t particularly care if there ended up being a few bruises out of the almost desperate clinging. 

After a couple minutes like that, Keith burrowed in as close as he could, hands knotted in Shiro’s shirt; Shiro was there, solid, breathing, with a heartbeat, alive and intact. Shiro shifted his hands a little, a few brief moments where it was his own checks that Keith was alive and whole.

It was a while before some of the residual fear and worry that’d been let out finally settled, chewed through with the proof that Zarkon hadn’t beaten them; they were both there, worse for wear but not broken or dead, and that was enough to keep moving with. 

They did eventually leave the room and split up, Shiro stopping him to check that he was at least feeling better before he wandered off into the hallways; it was a more honest “Yeah” than the one he’d given Pidge back in the hangar. 

He wandered the ship for a little while, eventually settling in the kitchens, curled around a bowl of the synthetic goop, still in the odd half-awake state that came from spending days running on crappy sleep and irregular meals. Hunk may have been the loudest about missing having a diet that wasn’t mostly made up of the alien synthetic equivalent of MRE’s, but at this point, he was pretty sure the enemy could get everyone’s attention and lure them out fast by planting a McDonald’s on an asteroid.

Sure, they’d be coming out of hiding to blow it to Hell in outrage at being baited with something that unfair and low of a blow, but it’d get them out of hiding.

He was interrupted in mulling over how valuable even trashy fast food would be right about then by the creeping feeling of not being alone and being watched; he looked up slowly to find Lance, apparently arrived not long before, settled across the table with his elbows on the table, hands folded in front of him covering part of his face.

Lance was oddly calm, serious, cautious, and focused, studying him; it was almost creepy, unsettling, and made Keith intensely uneasy, enough that he decided he preferred Lance’s normal shenanigans to Lance Actually Thinking For A Change.

“So about that thing you said about us all being in each other’s heads.”

He nodded over his food, staring back warily over it. 

“If Zarkon was…” Lance scrunched his face in a sour grimace, not wanting to finish the sentence. “That creepy feeling just before we all got split up…that was him?”

Keith nodded, poking at the bowl without looking at it. 

“And you ran in to start a fight with him.” He wasn’t sure where Lance was going with it at all. 

“It’s -“ He started to snap in defense; Lance was still weirdly not picking at anything, just watching him, with that incongruously serious expression. “Look, I realized pretty fast I couldn’t kill him there after the first shot I took, but if I’d tried to flee he would’ve killed me - and if I hadn’t kept him busy, he would’ve gotten to Black and we all would’ve been dead.” Shiro had concluded that he’d done the right thing, maybe for once he wouldn’t be the Reckless Crazy Person with the others, too, although until Lance opened his mouth again he wasn’t getting his hopes up.

“And he wasn’t paying enough attention to Black to stop Shiro from grabbing you and getting the Hell out of there with the rest of us, so you apparently did a pretty damn good job of keeping his attention.” Lance leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers, tapping the tips together.

Keith nodded. Lance had gone back to studying him.

He was trying not to bristle himself but it wasn’t working very well; he knew Lance wasn’t stupid. He had thought about just what Lance would probably be capable of if he weren’t second-guessing himself, self-sabotaging, and tripping over his own mental feet for a change. He’d wanted Lance to maybe shake out of his usual self-hamstringing patterns, definitely, but he hadn’t wanted it aimed at _him_. “…What?”

“Was he trying to get in your head or something? Is that why you’ve been acting weirder and bitchier than usual?”

Keith flinched, hand tightening on the spoon. Lance went still, then lowered his head and leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table and his forehead on his hands, the weird serious scrutiny collapsing into horror and worry.

“Shit. So you and Shiro both -“ 

He curled around the bowl a little more with a glower; Lance was the last person he wanted to talk about it with, and the last person he wanted giving him anything like pity.

Lance glanced up over his hands, one eye visible. “…And you kept up that fight with that going on the whole time?”

He nodded quietly. 

Lance shifted, looking away at the ground, shoving his hands in his coat pockets.

“…Thanks. I mean, I know you weren’t doing that for me, but… thanks.”

Keith made a quiet noise of acceptance; Lance stood and wandered out after a few minutes of awkward silence. 

It occurred to him that he’d spent most of his life growing so used to suffering in silence, expecting getting hurt to not mean anything to anyone other than Shiro, that it’d just become second nature; he was so used to being pushed-out and angry that it’d become a state of being, and ‘people that actually cared’ was a thing other ~~human~~ people had. 

Pidge was someone he had things in common with; her checking up and having some understanding made sense, she was struggling with some things similar herself. Hunk was the kind of person that, once someone had earned a way into his circle, would just adopt and worry over and care about everyone, no matter what; him worrying and trying to fuss at was a fact of his existence, like a planetary orbit. Coran was Coran, and just seemed to have made it his responsibility to try to look out for everyone on the ship; Allura was the Princess and had her own responsibility to them.

Lance had apparently hated him before they’d even properly met. Lance worrying about him, caring about him being hurt, and fumbling at figuring out how to do something about it was where all of the little context handwaves to avoid thinking about it suddenly failed to exist.

 

Grass was bright purple, Earth’s sun no longer rose in the West and set in the East, there were people that honestly, actually cared about him enough to be trying to get it across to him and enough to be persistent about it besides Shiro. 

 

 

He’d grown so used to taking that for granted as something that _didn’t_ happen that now that it was, he didn’t know what to do with it. As much as he’d spent a lot of his life quietly jealous of everyone where it just seemed to be a part of their lives they didn’t even think about existing without, it was somehow more terrifying than existing as the Strange Hypercompetent Antisocial Thing that was useful but could disappear with most people barely noticing. He was good at snapping back at people hurting him or trying to use him, pulling away and avoiding people, and driving people away, but not good at much else when it came to people. 

Red drug up the memory of Hunk’s comment back on Arus about him and Lance mirroring each other’s insecurities and being jealous and afraid of it. For once his mental reaction to her calm input was a half-hearted attempt at mentally flipping _her_ off that only seemed to briefly amuse the lion.

Shiro had weathered the worst Keith could manage without some kind of actual hurt to be directly angry over and not gone away, and he still had times where he was afraid he’d manage to screw that up somehow and put even Shiro off; that even Shiro was going to just go away or decide he wasn’t worth the trouble of putting up with anymore one day, or something else would happen to take Shiro away and he wouldn’t come back this time.

That not even Shiro was exempt from the previously inviolate natural law that everyone left him or gave up on him sooner or later. 

Red was watching intently again, waiting; he sent a vague, helpless mental foundering. Maybe Hunk had been right about him being afraid, and Pidge who’d also chalked up his reactions to fear, however much he didn’t want to admit it, and he wasn’t sure how to handle people other than Shiro caring about him without it just meaning more people to worry about chasing off or getting abandoned by when he _didn’t_ want them to leave him alone. 

And that wasn’t even getting into how they’d react to the near-certain odds Zarkon had been right and he _was_ the same as the monsters they’d been fighting, the scourge that had managed to hurt pretty much all of them one way or another. 

Going by how quick Shiro was to defend the one that’d helped him escape, Keith at least felt a little better about his own chances with Shiro on that in spite of Shiro being the one hurt the worst by the Galra, although he wasn’t sure how much better that made him feel. 

Shiro’s general narration sounded like this ‘Ulaz’ was also involved in replacing his arm with the prosthetic, and as much as Keith was grateful Shiro had escaped, he had to wonder if there wasn’t some ulterior motive there. Shiro had Hagar and Zarkon’s personal attention, which meant Ulaz had to have a position of rank, somewhere close enough in Zarkon’s circle to be working on their pet projects. 

Zarkon was a paranoid bastard to end all paranoid bastards; not only was anyone with that kind of access probably subjected to overkill on controls and checks for loyalty, but it would be almost impossible to get to that rank without some kind of atrocities that would be useful to Zarkon and ‘prove’ loyalty and agreement with his agenda. 

Not to mention that there was no actual guarantee that an agent hostile to Zarkon would be someone they actually wanted to associate with. He wanted to trust Shiro’s judgment, but he worried about Shiro’s desire to have faith in people; God only knew how bad Shiro’d been in the Garrison at recognizing red flags. There were a few occasions where someone had taken an interest in Shiro threw up enough of them that were solid and real enough that Keith hadn’t been the only one of Shiro’s friends hissing at the person and working to drive them off or herd Shiro away; all the while Shiro had been obliviously okay with the creeps as long as there wasn’t obvious, clear, hard-to-explain-away injury done.

Neither Keith nor any of the few others that seemed to take up “looking out for Shiro” had ever been inclined to let one of those incidents get far enough for that. 

Shiro was good at picking up on manipulations and ill intent aimed at others. In fact, it’d been what got Shiro cutting off the more persistent of those cases finally; either the Red Flag turning on him or one of Shiro’s other established safe friends and trying to turn Shiro against them, or attempts at changing tack to try to gain influence and manipulate Shiro’s ‘guard’ to get past them. Unfortunately, as good as Shiro was at gauging when someone was trying to use or abuse someone he cared about, he had a giant blind spot when it came to himself. It’d been part of their symbiotic relationship for most of the time they’d known each other. 

Shiro was his sense of stability, security, and a check against his temper and paranoia getting out of hand; he was Shiro’s self-preservation instinct, self-interest, and bullshit detector. He wasn’t sure either of them had entirely learned how to take up the slack on what the other one did during the two-year separation thanks to Kerberos beyond “what was necessary to function independently and try to get closer to goals”. 

And Shiro being absolutely certain that someone he’d had only one short, potentially means-to-an-end driven positive interaction with, however important it’d been, was Completely Trustworthy did not fill him with faith in Shiro’s judgment there. Ulaz being Galra made it worse, with what they knew about how long the entire species had been raised under at least massively skewed superiority rhetoric and warped ideology. Even if Ulaz was ‘better than most of Zarkon’s followers’, that was a bar set so low that it probably took drilling to the core of the hypothetical planet to find it. 

Shiro probably _would_ accept that Keith was Galra without question, but he had his doubts if Shiro _should_ be as willing to trust a Galra as he apparently was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It probably is worth saying here - I'm not long out of finishing a Bachelor's in Psychology. I have a lot of Feelings and tangents I could go on about mental health issues and misconceptions about them, including the idea that it's separate from physical health and other medical conditions. I've also got a couple good friends with PTSD, and have been the one trying to ground or work out how to help with flashbacks, freezes, and trauma rattles.
> 
> Honestly, especially for what the series is, I don't know if it was entirely intentional but they did a pretty decent job of PTSD portrayal with Shiro, and he's one of the cases where I feel like I *can* look at something fictional and go "THIS!" instead of hemming and hawing about symptom patterns, the difference between long-term disorders and "bad coping mechanisms and valid reactions to high stress situations", and "this but maybe also this?". 
> 
> It does show noticeable changes in brain function, too, which is why I'd written it as something where it does show up to the Altaean medical scanners. It also IS a complicated mess that impacts a lot more than just the brain and central nervous system, which is why Coran is hedging about trying to address it as long as Shiro's managing to be Basically Functional.


	19. Show me a falling star and I'll show you who you are

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Allura fumbles at an apology for the lack of warning.
> 
> Ulaz is not around long enough for much, but still manages to throw a lot of things off for Keith - and there's no good chance for anything without someone else he doesn't want to know overhearing any questions.
> 
> Which leads to a little bit of Keith failing at being subtle. He only really succeeds at getting people worried about him and questioning what's going on, and Shiro catching him for it first.
> 
>  
> 
> (Was dead with the plague for a while there @_@ but am back among the living!)

Keith could only spend so much time in his own head before the need to throw his energy into something physical or constructive became overwhelming. There was a bit of time left before they arrived, so he went to the training bay, intent on taking it out on the drones. 

His plans were a little interrupted by Allura catching up just as he reached the deck. She followed into the large room, two of the mice on her shoulders, and stayed by the door, a few odd gestures signaling moments of almost saying something and then rethinking.

“Red thinks you had the right idea at first - letting us form our own impressions…just that it went on a little too long.” He wasn’t happy with it, but it was draining into flat and tired; he only had so much energy to stay that agitated, and by that point, most of it was being eaten up by worrying about what they were walking into, worrying about his own heritage, and being angry at Zarkon for getting to him that badly…and more angry at Zarkon for the realization that the amusement and Zarkon’s weird possessive tendencies meant Zarkon was probably assuming “Galra” meant Keith was something he could push around or lay claim to.

He was taking Red’s advice and saving his vengeful rage for the one actually out to get them all; saying his own thoughts on the matter rather than the lions risked reopening something that was starting to heal over.

“The lion is…probably right.” She sighed heavily, looking away. “After a point it was just…easier. As if everything that happened was some bad dream that we could make fade away by pretending it had never occurred.” After an uncomfortable pause, she looked up to make eye contact, a gesture that seemed to take focus and effort. “And - I was afraid to face it even to warn you all about what could happen; you all brought life and warmth back to this Castle, and I didn’t want that to -” She took a moment to find words. “To taint it. Sometimes I could almost forget for a while…” 

It was his turn to look away; she may not have had Zarkon digging in her head, but she’d lived with him and lost almost everything to him. “…Sorry.” 

She gave a weak, sympathetic smile. “I don’t think you’re the one who needs to apologize - you and Shiro both were hurt horribly, and we could have at least warned you so that you could prepare better. You were right; whatever the reasons, we put your lives at a great and unnecessary risk.” 

He stared awkwardly; he wasn’t really sure how to respond. He’d been fully prepared to sort through his own feelings and leave it past with no further comment. He was not used to people besides Shiro apologizing for the harm done by well-meaning actions, particularly not people in some form of authority over him; the norm was hearing the intent defended as the point and getting in trouble if he pushed back too hard. 

“Well. I. Thank you?” He shifted weight from one foot to the other. “I thought it over and I’d rather just be angry at Zarkon. It wouldn’t have mattered if he wasn’t abusing it.”

She almost laughed at his awkward flounder, but there was an odd thinking worry holding it back that made him uncomfortable somehow. “Unfortunately we do need to mind what openings we give him.”

He nodded, running a hand through his hair. 

She looked him over in the silence, glancing away cautiously. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to work on low-gravity more…”

It would’ve been a bad idea he would’ve known to turn down when he was still angry, but she’d managed to effectively flood out the last embers of it. “It definitely couldn’t hurt.”

Allura looked up, half caught off guard as if she hadn’t expected him to be okay with it, then smiled. 

She skipped the drill-sergeant baiting; he wasn’t sure if it was because she wasn’t playing off Coran being there for instruction and feedback, or because she was still being cautious of another argument. She was chiming in advice, calling breaks occasionally to correct stance or movement.

She was mostly trying to hold to the Altaean for that, but he still caught her lapsing the other direction when they were just sparring - and this time there was something familiar about some of the other set of movements, even if it was a much closer look than “through Red’s screens”. 

After something a little more than an hour, they took a break, gravity back on. Allura seemed to be in mostly better spirits, and as harsh as she’d been before, “doing better” was probably hard earned. 

It was a distracting, lingering thought, matching the base patterns, the echoes between her and a much larger frame with a much less static weapon. He knew he’d gone pensive, and he was trying to keep the sidelong glances from being suspicious, but she visibly caught one, looking away with a darker, more guarded expression.

He focused on the far wall; he knew better than to say anything. 

“Yes. He did.” It was simple, flat, and clipped. 

“Sorry.” He hadn’t been fast enough coming up with something to distract; it was one of those skills Lance made look easy that he couldn’t quite figure out. 

“Truthfully, I learned a little from all of the old Paladins, but…”. Zarkon had apparently put more time into it, enough for her to have learned split styles instead of scattered pointers. 

“Well…it probably helps knowing what to expect.” It was the best he could come up with' he wasn’t really sure what to say. 

She gave a bitter snort. “I suppose there is that.” She stared off into space, idly petting Platt in her lap with one hand. He heard scrabbling on his armor before Plachu was on his shoulder, paws on the raised collar of the armor, peering at him intently. 

“…what’s wrong?” It was pretty obvious she wasn’t okay, although it seemed like the kind of question that would be ‘alphabetically or categorically’ as an answer. 

She started, expression taking a complete defensive 180 as both of the mice scrabbled around to stare at her with a couple squeaks. She turned her attention to Plachu with a moment of betrayed frustration and a “But-”, which was cut off by Platt squeaking something emphatic. 

She made a frustrated noise, looking away, and sat straighter against the wall. “It’s… I saw him, briefly. When I was taken.” She still wasn’t looking at him, shoulders stiff, hands knotted around her retracted staff. “He only registered my presence as - _bait_ to draw all of you into his reach, nothing else. He barely even bothered to _look_ at me.”

He opened his mouth, trying to find something to say; it was painfully familiar, the impact of realizing that you didn’t matter at all to someone trusted, someone that was supposed to be responsible and care about you; that someone who should’ve been safe wasn’t. At first all he managed was reaching over, fingers brushing the sleek armor covering her upper arm, looking away himself. He was supposed to have something comforting to say, but there wasn't really anything he could find. “It…never gets any easier. Sorry.” 

She looked over, the staff resting on her folded knees in front of Platt, hands still on it; it shifted as her shoulders slumped, the weight of grief and betrayal starting to show for once. “How do you manage?”

He grimaced, looking back with a faint shift of his shoulders. “Define ‘manage’.” She had to be as aware as anyone of what a shitshow he was with people, after all. “I guess… I’ve just worked on trying to pull away after I get burned bad enough - work on getting to where they mean as little to me as I did to them.” He hadn’t kept many pictures from his childhood; he’d gotten rid of gifts and reminders, burned some things when he settled in the shack, put names out of his mind, got used to distance as a bomb shelter defense that had somehow survived Shiro short-circuiting his way around it and was only just starting to relax. 

Allura watched him for a couple of minutes before shaking her head slowly. “I -”, she started, then stopped. “I’ve already lost everything to him and the Galra once. I don’t think I could go through that again.”

The nagging, rattling worry came back, how she’d react if she found out - part of him still wanted to believe it was some kind of a ploy, but he could work Galra controls. 

It wasn’t what was bothering her now, and he could only hope she’d still see him as the same person if it did come out.

“We’ll be as careful as we can.” They were fighting a heavily outgunned war; risks were a part of the reality of it.

****************************

 

Coran’s narration had been way too cheerful for having an intruder on board. 

It made sense as Keith realized he hadn’t even seen as much of the chase as Coran did, but he could still keep a mental tally of how many times their intruder could have taken serious shots at one of them and had opted for dodging and evading instead. There were no wounds except to pride, and that was a pretty hard blow when the Paladins of Voltron were actually trying and the other party was almost making an “indulge the children” sort of game out of it. 

Getting a good look at the sword was a hard, sharp change of direction; suddenly bruised ego vanished as some kind of real, solid clue to his past and his family was literally right in front of his face, the last tiny shred of denial over what he was fading out and dying when Ulaz deactivated his mask.

He was Galra. Zarkon had been trying to exploit something that had always been there. 

And there was someone with another blade like the one he’d carried his entire life right there. He still wasn’t sure how far he trusted the entire situation, but Ulaz had to have some kind of connection to his family.

Ties to his parents didn’t help his paranoia nearly as much as most people would’ve thought. He knew nothing of his mother; his father hadn’t been around a lot when he was small, and then one of the incidents of “gone for a few days” just didn’t include the man showing back up.

He’d been going through motions of scrounging for increasingly scarce food in the house and following routines for two weeks before someone realized something was wrong and the authorities showed up. 

Before they headed to the hangar, Ulaz held his hands out, drawing attention to the cuffs still on his wrists. “Not that I begrudge your sense of caution, but this will make my part of this rather more complicated.”

Allura narrowed her eyes. “We’re already trusting you with my people on your station.”

“Yes, but while I could likely manage by borrowing Shiro as an extra hand to navigate the base, he does not have enough access to open the secure channels for our headquarters.” 

Shiro’s long suffering distraction refocused, caught off guard; there was an implication Keith had caught as well - that Shiro specifically would be recognized by Ulaz’s security. 

“Look, if worst comes to worst, I’m sure we-” Pidge and Hunk both managed to interrupt Shiro with an in-unison look of frustration; Ulaz had taken on all four of the rest of them without seeming that pressed until Shiro got in his path. “I can handle anything, and I’ll have cover fire.” He gestured to Pidge, Hunk, and Keith. 

Shiro had a short staredown with Allura; at first it was any guess which of them would give ground, then Allura sighed, and deactivated the cuffs to remove them. 

Ulaz stretched his wrists, then stood and nodded to Shiro to lead the way out. 

Going as a group meant taking the long way to the hangar; Pidge and Hunk were both tense, Pidge moreso,while Shiro was just barely covering exasperated frustration with the rest of them. Keith was stuck between his own suspicions and frustration of his own; he didn’t trust this - too neat, too convenient, too easy after everything they’d been through, but if it was a trap, then he’d lose what might be his only chance at an answer.

He couldn’t ask anything around the others without them knowing what he was - and while he worried about Shiro’s potential to be too trusting, all of them except Lance going was committing an awful lot to an unknown.

“If you two want to hold back in case something goes wrong, Shiro and I can probably handle this.” 

He earned four varying looks of confusion for that. Pidge was staring at him like he’d lost his mind, Hunk actually looked concerned, Shiro was just confused, and Ulaz - as guarded as he was - didn’t seem sure what to make of him.

“Look, if this is a trap, then whoever stays might need to go after whoever goes. I don’t think Lance wants to get stuck being the entire rescue team if something goes wrong.”

Pidge and Hunk nodded thoughtfully, although they were still looking at him a little oddly; Shiro was just covering tired exasperation.

“That - actually makes sense but why you two?” Hunk motioned between Keith and Shiro. “It seems kind of…”. He trailed off, glancing to Pidge.

“You both are really close range focused. It’d make more sense to send like…Hunk and Keith or Keith and I, so it’d be harder to overwhelm at range and no offense Shiro, but it’d also cover if you were compromised.” The worst part was that Keith couldn’t argue with it, even though it completely destroyed any chance he might have at asking questions without the others finding out what he was. 

“And be a lousy way to introduce ourselves to allies, especially if someone reacts without thinking.” Shiro shot both Pidge and Keith sharp looks. “I know we haven’t had much call for it yet but we _are_ also supposed to be _diplomats_.” Shiro motioned to both of them with another pointed look. “So are we ready to go?”

Keith tried to school his expression to military neutral, although he caught an odd sideways glance from Hunk and the distinct impression Hunk had noticed something was up and wasn’t sure what to make of it. Shiro’s verbal nudge at least seemed to have the effect he’d intended, as all three of them squared up to go. 

“Red is the fastest, so we’re going to take her; it’ll be less complicated that way, and the communications outpost doesn’t look like it’s got much for docking bays anyway.” Shiro gave a short glance up to check with Ulaz, who nodded. 

On the one hand, it meant most of the lions being on the Castle if something went wrong; on the other hand, if something went wrong, it meant needing to ferry Pidge, Hunk, and Shiro back to the Castle or hoping the circumstances were enough for their lions to come on their own. 

Keith nodded, turning to walk ahead; they’d be going to his hangar, after all, he’d need to flag Red, and it wasn’t like he could think of anything else to say that would be safe around Pidge and Hunk. Hunk decided to just act like nothing was going on, but he apparently still wasn’t succeeding at acting like nothing was going on; Ulaz gave him a very guarded, gauging look, then glanced sideways to Shiro, who caught it enough for a very faint, confused shrug. 

Shiro continued as if nothing was odd, and Ulaz went along. It was increasingly unsettling that Ulaz gave very little for reactions or any kind of clear expression tells that Keith could read; the man was either unnaturally even-tempered or incredibly good at minding his own presentation and controlling his own reactions. If he had been infiltrating the Empire high enough to be working on pet projects for Zarkon and Hagar, he’d have to be able to avoid either of them realizing anything was off.

He was quietly praying Shiro was right even as he was more on edge for it; Ulaz had been a match for all of the rest of them put together, Keith couldn’t tell much of anything of where his attention was or what his reactions were, and he had to be both perfectly intelligent and damn good at more than one field to’ve worked on that arm and planned around Shiro’s escape. 

If Ulaz wasn’t on their side, he’d make Sendak look about as dangerous as if Klaixap had seriously tried to attack the Castle. 

He had Red’s attention before they reached the Hangar, dropping half of his confusion and worry over it on the lion in a massive messy mental package. She didn’t seem to have any problem deciphering it, but didn’t have any good clue either way; there was an acknowledgement that it was possible Ulaz wasn’t on their side and there was a trap somewhere, but also an acknowledgement that Shiro had to’ve learned some instinct for wariness to survive those two years. 

If there was a trap involved, her guess was it springing after they were out of the Castle when it would be most awkward for them to respond, probably on the outpost itself. 

There also wasn’t a good way to walk ahead and keep track of Ulaz without visibly keeping an eye back over his shoulder, something he was sure the Galra had noticed even if there wasn’t much visible reaction - just a little more of the feeling of eyes on his back. 

Red made it a little easier when they were all in the cockpit; he learned, now that he was trying, that he _could_ keep track of everything else within the lion. It was almost a little unsettling with the others and got him reflexively tracing over the walls around his own discoveries about his identity to reinforce them; the other Paladins were noticeably larger presences, the lines louder and clearer. They seemed like larger presences than they’d been in the beginning, even, when he’d first become aware of the relay, bits of things coming through louder and clearer; he wasn’t sure if it was changes in his own connection with Red and the rest of them, or something to do with their growing ties to the lions that Coran had pointed out. 

That was definitely noticeable. Shiro almost seemed to have brought part of Black’s starfield wrapped around him, semi-consciously keeping it like a thin misdirection of focus over a tangle of emotions - relief that Ulaz was alright, frustration with everyone else but holding that to give them time to figure things out for themselves; Ulaz’s involvement in his escape had left a deep impression, and he had enough faith in that to be sure it would work out once everyone else had time to settle their own fears. 

And there was awareness that _something_ was still wrong with Keith that he didn’t know about that had him worried and a little distracted trying to figure it out; for a moment, there was a near-conscious ping of contact, frustrated concern glancing off the barriers he was drawing and something a little confusion tangled and upset-wounded at the realization Keith was even blocking him out. 

He tried not to react in the seat, but the way that tentative prodding pulled back suddenly with a distinct feel of realizing there’d been a boundary overstepped, and an actual, far too intentional sense of apology for prying that had an undertone of guilt Keith barely caught tied back to how it hadn’t been that long ago that Keith’d had Zarkon forcibly prying in - Shiro had noticed that he’d noticed and had backpedaled from wanting to figure out what was wrong to not wanting to repeat Zarkon’s intrusions.

Keith left a “ _YOU’RE NOT ZARKON STOP APOLOGIZING FOR HIM_ ” as pointedly as he could on that. Shiro didn’t quite manage to not visibly shift weight behind him at that.

Pidge was a ball of nerves wrapped in green growth and full of thorns; she didn’t like the situation at all, enough that his weird cagey reactions had registered but weren’t top priority right now - she was on edge and ready for things to go wrong, focused enough to not be broadcasting much else.

Hunk was something that probably should’ve been solid stone, but was feeling a little more like a mass of shifting sand that couldn’t quite settle, wobbling back and forth between relief at their being allies, _of course they can’t all be bad they’re thinking people right?_ , wanting to trust Shiro, and a mass of basic caution, awareness that Ulaz had been damn close to Zarkon’s circle, that the whole thing could be a put-on job, and that it hadn’t been the first time they’d had someone pretend to be friendly and try to knife them in the back. 

And a much less focused and consciously directed “Something is wrong with Keith” that was definitely poking in, but seemed to be wobbling between trying to fish and just gauging odds of being able to catch Keith to figure it out otherwise later; besides the little test-prods it was mostly a back-burner awareness and worry over him acting weird. 

Ulaz’s presence was noticeable, something that felt different from the others, but there was nothing he could tell beyond ‘living thing’ and the vague difference in feel for him being Galra. It was noticeable enough for Keith to worry about whether or not the others would be able to pick up on it from him; Red put an almost palpable mental paw on him there, although the reasoning for ‘it’s unlikely’ wasn’t translating to concepts he could follow very well. The best he could read had to do with how much attention was actively paid and when the lines were loudly open enough for it to be possibly noticeable. 

They would apparently need to be paying attention and know what it meant, and Red didn't think it would stand out that much when it’d always been there from when they all first made contact with the relay.

As they were landing in the Outpost’s one small hangar, he did overhear a very quiet exchange as Ulaz nudged Shiro’a shoulder. “Your friend is very… protective of you.”

Shiro gave a faint, weak laugh. “We’ve known each other for a while now - before everything.” Shiro knew Keith had been looking for answers and him the whole time; he appreciated it, even if he was still unsure how he’d earned the near-obsessive loyalty.

Keith was trying not to poke back over the relay at Shiro’s chronic habit of not thinking much of himself or his accomplishments.

“Honestly I think it’s partly just Keith. I mean, him and Lance fight all the time and even back at the beginning, when Lance got hit he was hovering all fussy like he’d stab anything not one of us that got close.” Hunk was definitely a little proud of it, but Keith caught a little bit of intentional redirect in there. Hunk was keeping it friendly enough to not need to backpedal if things went well, but was also wary of things that could be used against them. 

Ulaz made a thoughtful noise, although Keith still had that feeling of being watched.

There wouldn’t be much chance for other answers; just small bits dangled just on the edge of his reach - _ceremonial blade_ , the same as Red had identified it originally, not enough information on what they were now for Red to tell if there was anything in common with then, but if Shiro was right then maybe there would be a chance -

And then that jarred back into reality and how vulnerable they still were when the robeast’s capsule entered the system.

 

*********************

 

Later after they’d left the system, he wandered up to the larger observatory deck, the simulation of the old mixed colony gas giant coming up again. He slid down onto the couch, watching the recorded ships from ten thousand years ago go by, his knife on his lap. 

Shiro had been right. It was enough that he still felt bad about reacting as badly as he did, even if he knew why and that he wasn’t sure how else he could have responded at the time; he’d gotten a chance to talk to Shiro at least, a little. There wasn’t any chance to say anything to Ulaz, and that was a bigger weight; he’d been a ball of knives and accusations, and Ulaz really was the only reason he had Shiro back. None of them would be here without Ulaz risking everything back there, and he wasn’t sure of their odds if Ulaz hadn’t sacrificed himself against the monster, either. 

If Ulaz was a sign of what the Galra side of his heritage was like, then maybe it wasn’t as horrible as he was afraid of. It almost raised more questions than his previous best theory. The Galra losing track of some tool for infiltration rigged to pass for human made sense to him - they’d been looking for the Blue Lion, someone on the ground would be able to find it more easily and draw less attention. 

For all he knew, that’s how Sendak had known to show up looking, and that’s what whoever had left the knife was infiltrating. 

It was a ridiculous long shot with his history and lack of guidance, but being a lost gamble that paid off for one side more than the other was possible - 

And if he was how they’d known to come look for Blue after ten thousand years not finding it, then it raised more uncomfortable questions about how they’d been found at the outpost. 

The door opened; he twisted around to see, sliding the still-wrapped knife back into its sheath. Shiro was hanging back by the door, giving him time to react. He nodded, sinking back into the couch; Shiro walked over, settling onto the couch next to him. 

“Quite a view you’ve found.”

Keith nodded quietly. 

“Kind of makes you feel small… seeing something like this and knowing we barely counted as a civilization back then.”

“Yeah.” He folded his arms, leaning his head back on the couch. 

Shiro went quiet for a minute, then looked over, watching him with a worried frown. Keith was trying to ignore it, with a growing urge to shift a little further away. Shiro went back to watching the simulated projection, until it fell back into less tense silence. 

There were a few more things about the situation where they all probably owed Ulaz. “You know I was thinking.” Keith paused, giving Shiro a chance to snap out of whatever train of thought he’d fallen into, staring off at the simulation. “Ulaz did a lot of the work on your arm, right?”

Shiro went from listening to caught off guard, nodding.

“Then he probably was altering the programming for it from the beginning to undermine whatever Zarkon and Hagar were trying to do.” He could guess from Shiro’s nightmares and reactions to even the old painting of Hagar that she’d been working on him herself toward some end, but it didn’t sound like she’d been the one mainly working on the mechanical side of the prosthetic. “It really is your arm, not theirs.”

Shiro lifted the mechanical hand, flexing fingers with the very faint sound of the mechanisms, staring at it speculatively; he almost looked a little queasy.

“You okay there?”

“I - yeah.” Shiro shook his head. “I’ve been remembering a little more of things. I’m not sure I wanted to. We wouldn't be here without him, but...” 

Keith raised an eyebrow, glancing between the hand and him; he was guessing at Shiro remembering more about the surgeries to get it, knew better than to just say it, but not quite better enough to not ask. 

Shiro nodded, folding his arms and looking away uncomfortably. “I mean. I was unconscious for a lot of it, and drugged up pretty bad on painkillers afterwards, so… there’s that?” He shifted, as if trying and failing to settle where he was. “He wasn’t… cruel about things the way the others around there were, but - he had to blend in. He was pretty brusque, only gave the bare minimum for explanations, and wouldn’t answer questions most of the time.” 

It figured; anything else would’ve drawn questions, and that wasn’t a position where Ulaz could afford Zarkon or Hagar deciding something looked off. “At least they didn’t question him using anesthetic.” It was a pretty weak and cynical bright side, but from everything he’d heard and seen about Zarkon’s upper echelons…

Shiro gave a weak, nervous laugh, and grimaced; it hadn’t helped the way he was looking green around the gills. 

Keith was pretty sure it was a bad idea to stay on this subject, and for a minute half wished he had an ounce of Lance’s ability to just segue off into something harmless without it coming across awkward or being too obvious. There was the off chance that if some of the memory issue Hagar had caused was getting less bad…

“Is there much else coming back?”

Shiro paused, thinking. “It’s still pretty spotty? There’s pretty big gaps and I’m still having things come in and out, but…” It did give Keith a little hope, after Coran hedged for worst-case, that maybe the pod’s attempt at stabilizing things _did_ have some lasting effect. “Things are still coming back here and there.” He inclined his head, smiling slyly at Keith. “Like you wedged up on a rooftop out of sight complaining to yourself about the instructors and most of the class in Japanese, and almost falling off the maintenance shed when I answered one of your rhetorical questions.” 

Keith blinked, almost startling as the subject change got abruptly turned back on him. “There wasn’t supposed to be anyone else up there, and do you know how few people there spoke Japanese?”

“You barely counted. Your accent’s still awful.” 

Keith huffed. “I hadn’t heard much of it since I was like…seven.” His grandparents were the only reason he knew it, and it’d only ever been useful for being something very few people around him understood. “And nobody else understanding me was the _point_.” He’d stopped using it for that for a while after first meeting Shiro, during the few weeks of suddenly having the downtime distraction of why-is-this-person-taking-an-interest-in-me. He did know now what Shiro had been doing, but he was also unsure how well Shiro’s memory was coming back, and it was weirdly comforting to dredge things up retracing teasing and conversations they’d had before. “Why were you even up on that roof, anyway?”

If Shiro knew it was a question that’d happened before, he wasn’t showing it. “I’d noticed you slinking around; you looked pretty upset, so I thought I’d check on you.” Shiro folded his arms, tapping the metal arm with one of his good fingers. “Not like there aren’t reasons to worry about overly quiet unhappy younger people seeking out rooftops and high places.” 

Keith sank a little lower in the couch. “It was one of the easiest ways to get away from people without trying to go over the wall.” He’d avoided people noticing him heading up there well enough that he had stopped thinking about what it would look like to others. 

“It was a relief that you were mostly just angry, but… you still had me worried for a while.” 

“And that’s why you kept popping up in places people weren’t supposed to be?” It’d been like something out of some old cartoon; Shiro somehow managed to sneak up on him exactly when he’d checked that nobody was there and settled in solitude, but had been pretty careful about keeping distance, keeping quiet, and being patiently friendly and gentle no matter how badly Keith reacted to getting startled or snapped at questions. 

“Pretty much. You kept acting like you expected me to have some ulterior motive or something. It was pretty obvious you weren’t really used to people caring about you… and that you were trying to scare me off.” Shiro reached over, resting his good hand on Keith’s shoulder. 

“Why did you stick around? You didn’t even know me. I was some random younger cadet back then.” It was deja’vu; a conversation that’d happened before, out in the desert, after Shiro had found out he spent breaks alone in the middle of nowhere and decided that had to be fixed, going through motions where he was getting the sinking feeling that Shiro might not remember that it _was_ something that’d happened before, even if he was starting to do better. 

“Because you didn’t seem to have anybody else checking on you, and I’d seen enough of what you were doing elsewhere and the way you were acting to know most of what you said was…” Shiro paused, thinking. “That you were afraid, so you were puffing up and hissing to try to make me go away. It was like…” He stared off at the stars in the simulation, eyes narrowed as he was fishing at some memory that was just barely within fingertip reach. “Like one of the snakes you showed me out in the desert. The harmless ones that flatten their heads, shake their tails, and coil up to try and look like a rattlesnake.” 

“Hognoses. There’s not many things that want to hang around to get a close look.” That wasn’t how it’d gone before exactly; Shiro didn’t remember it, but had found a completely different direction. Back before Kerberos, Shiro had left it at worrying about him, figuring out he was alone, and deciding he was worth taking the time to look after; Shiro’d also been doing that for half of the Garrison, so Keith hadn’t thought much of it beyond Shiro being Shiro. Shiro had not said anything before about thinking of Keith as ‘afraid’ or 

“You reacted to me not being afraid of that about the same as the one you showed me, too.” Shiro had pulled his hand back, but there was a much more focused, calculating cast to the smile Shiro was giving him that was definitely sharper than anything that’d come up before Kerberos. 

And the hognose he’d found out in the desert had reacted to Keith calmly walking up in spite of its display and picking it up by playing dead. “You know when I did that, it was a coin flip whether it’d play dead or bite me, right?” He glared sideways, hunching his shoulders and leaving the ‘I wasn’t that bad’ unsaid. “I only did that because I knew it’d either hit gloves or sleeve or something, or not do much to me anyway if it did find skin.” 

“So about the same.” Shiro shrugged. The worst part was that even though this wasn’t how Shiro had explained it before, he had a suspicion Shiro wasn’t remembering _wrong_ about his reasoning back then either; as much as he’d been frustrated with Shiro’s tendency to put everyone ahead of himself to a self-destructive extent, he did notice that Shiro was damn good at adjusting around people, changing patterns to whatever someone else seemed to need or want sometimes ahead of them knowing it themselves, and knew that some of it had to be conscious.

And he doubted Shiro would have managed to fish out the memory of him hassling some poor hognose while they were out hiking if there wasn’t enough of an association with his snarling and sniping to make the connection. 

“…You decided that even if I did seriously lash out, I wasn’t going to do anything worth worrying about?” He turned to stare suspiciously at Shiro, unsure if he should be thrown off that Shiro didn’t think he was capable of doing real damage or shaking Shiro for his lack of self-preservation instinct. 

“Pretty much? I mean, I wasn’t crowding you and you didn’t seem that violent if someone wasn’t threatening you or doing something to earn it, and you spent too much time trying to avoid people that annoyed you to be the type to get creative if someone hadn’t really worked to make you angry.” And any of his attempts at barbs and insults had just seemed to go right past Shiro as if he’d been speaking Swahili. 

He didn’t really have a good answer for that, either, so he settled for looking off the other way in a sulk that he couldn’t quite put the weight into that he wanted. Part of him wanted to be alarmed at how easily Shiro had not just waltzed around most of his snarling, avoidance, and posturing, but _read it without even knowing where it came from_ ; it didn’t get very far when it was coming from Shiro.

And Red was doing that bemused tugging and reminding him of Hunk’s frustrated commentary all the way back on Arus, making it very clear she had no intention of letting him forget that he did, in fact, have more people than just Shiro now. 

Shiro laughed, and ruffled his hair, getting little more reaction than Keith trying to shrink away and failing. 

There were a few beats, before the good humor dampened, and Shiro nudged his shoulder to get him to look up.

“What’s been bothering you?”

He had the sinking feeling that, even though he’d probably never be ‘okay’ with Zarkon getting in his head, he couldn’t dodge to that as the problem - not when Shiro was as aware of their moment of tripping over each other mentally earlier as he was, and that Shiro knew he was aware Shiro’d realized he was hiding something. 

He did look up; he knew Shiro wouldn’t turn on him for it, that Shiro was probably the one safe person he had to talk to about it… but everything kind of froze up at the thought of trying to say it out loud. There was a finality to that, as if he could still pretend it might not be real if he didn’t say it. “…I don’t want to talk about it yet.”

Shiro frowned; there was a little bit of hurt to it, but a lot more concern and nagging worry. “You know that I don’t think you’re capable of anything that would make me think any less of you.”

“Yeah.” He curled up, pulling his feet up onto the couch to draw his knees up closer. “I just… need time. That’s all.” 

Shiro nodded quietly, folding his hands in his lap. “I’ll be here. Just - be careful? If it’s anything he can try to exploit, I’d rather be able to help you than leave you dealing with it alone.”

“I know. I’m…” He took a deep breath, not sure what to do with it. “You know you’ll be the first one I talk to when I can.”


	20. You've got to try to find what's right before your eyes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Coran puts his foot down that the Castle needs some maintenance, and Hunk uses it to make sure Keith can't run away from a conversation.
> 
> Then one of Shiro's nightmares finally hits everyone, getting him converged on and Pidge deciding to deal with some of the vague fears by checking for anything that might be a risk. (Also one short reference to the comics again re: Pidge and Shiro's arm.)

Any other plans were derailed as Coran brought up maintenance schematics and a list of demands to keep the ship running. It was long, passionate, and half of it involved Altaean technical terms Keith was not even sure Pidge and Hunk understood, but Allura had winced a couple times and Pidge and Hunk were not happy seeing the maintenance readouts. 

Apparently a lot of it was wear and tear and incidental damage, things that had been hastily repaired back to “well it will work for now” in previous emergencies but never completely restored, and things where the self-repair systems were doing their best but had never been meant to work without at least some engineering crew backing them up. Coran’s ultimatum was that if they wanted a functioning ship, they were going to take time for proper maintenance, or the Castle itself would enforce the “or else”. 

Keith had thought there wasn’t much for him to be doing, and had started wandering halls again when there was a sudden loud chirp from the wall and one of the consoles coming to life with Pidge’s voice. “Hey Keith, can you come down to the engine room? We could use some extra hands.” A map flashed on the screen, highlighting the engine core itself. 

He was wary entering the big chamber; it seemed to just be Pidge and Hunk down there, both working in their armor, which only dialed that down slightly. Pidge was halfway up the wall with a cord and clips securing her to the ladder built into it while she was focused on something inside a panel, and Hunk had the central console in front of the massive energy beam and central reactor half taken apart. 

Hunk waved him over; as he got closer, he noticed the mice were present, Platt sitting next to one of the light panels next to the console while Hunk was on the other side, the other three skittering around inside the dismantled console’s pillar. Hunk was mostly focused on a part of machinery on the side, with a spread of tools next to him. “Here give me a second.” Whatever he was adjusting was apparently not something he could put down easily at that second. “I’m gonna need someone to hold things steady. The mice have been great but they’re too little to do it.” Hunk hit some kind of workable break point on the parts, and set the device down. 

Keith settled down cross legged next to the mess, waiting while Hunk dug around in the half-dismantled console. “…Is it okay to have the engine going while this is all in pieces like this?” 

Hunk didn’t even pull his head out of the machinery, waving vaguely Keith’s direction. “The main control’s redirected to a secondary console Pidge is controlling, and we’re doing temporary reroutes as we go to keep it functional.” He was pulling thick cabling with some kind of joint out from the understructure, wrestling it to where it’d rest within reach, then sat up, pulling it around. “Here - hold this -” Keith carefully put his hands near where Hunk’s were, on either side of the joint, already not feeling confident at all about being extra hands for working on the main console for the massive, glowing mass of the central reactor a few yards away. He _knew_ this was one of the rooms they’d sent Pidge to hit while Sendak had the Castle, and how much it would mess everything up if anything went wrong.

The Garrison made damn sure everyone had basics enough to do their own maintenance and repairs in an emergency, but he was not a mechanic, and the Castle was well beyond the scope of what he remembered of that training. The cord Hunk had him holding thrummed in his hands, almost uncomfortably warm and vibrating enough that he was pretty sure his hands would go numb if he had to stay there too long. 

“Okay, now-” Hunk spent a minute carefully shifting where Keith’s hands were and how the cable was angled. “Keep that there and don’t move.” Hunk looked up to the light screen nearby. “You guys have that physical bypass ready?” 

There was scurrying inside the machinery, a couple squeaks from below, then Platt nodded and saluted. 

“Pidge, you have the bypass up there ready?”

Her “Ready!” came from both the screen next to Platt and a fainter voice up above where she actually was. Keith decided he didn’t want to ask what he was holding or what they were doing maintenance repairs on; he was afraid of the thick cord in his hands enough already.

“Alright guys, hit it!”

Whatever Platt and Pidge did, there was a louder hum from inside the floor, and the cable in his hand hummed down to a low vibration; it didn’t switch off entirely.

Hunk pulled over tools, readouts on his helmet visible across the inside of his visor as he focused on the joint in between Keith’s hands, disconnecting it and tugging Keith’s wrists enough to have the ends a few inches apart; there was still arcing energy in between the pieces, and holding them apart took some effort as the ends seemed to want to pull back together. 

And Hunk was working on something inside the joint itself. 

Keith also decided that ‘what happens if something goes wrong with this or I slip’ wasn’t something he wanted answered.

Hunk was focused, but otherwise seemed actually relaxed about the whole thing; Keith was trying not to pay attention to the reactor core or think about it, and was weighing this versus getting shot at and where they both were relative to each other on the scale of stress.

“So Keith. How’ve you been holding up with everything?” Hunk was staying focused on his work, but was perfectly calm and conversational about it, if distracted sounding. 

“Uh. What?” All he had to do was hold still, but even peripheral awareness of the giant ball of volatile energy in the room made him anxious about not devoting full attention to that. 

“You know. There was that whole thing at the command center and you seemed hit pretty hard by that, and you’ve still been acting kinda weird.” 

He was almost certain that Hunk had intentionally waited to ask until he literally couldn’t move, and he was adjusting his assessment of who among the others to be afraid of. Hunk was terrifying, even if Red had caught on as well and seemed to approve, almost laughing in his head. “Okay, I guess? I mean, Zarkon wiped the floor with me pretty hard and he … really isn’t someone you want in your head, but…” 

Staying absolutely still and not moving, definitely not letting his hands shift while Hunk was cleaning the connections and adjusting them to make sure they were properly placed. 

“Yeah, I was there when Lance figured it out - just stopped mid-sentence of rambling trying to wrap his head around Zarkon being a paladin and said something about ‘THAT’S why Keith was being a weird creepy basket case about getting in each other’s heads!’, then he said he was gonna go find you. I thought about going along because man, that had to be Hell, but you were kinda acting like a scared stray cat, so I figured you’d probably just get angry or bolt if we both showed up.” Hunk’s tone was bored and a little unnaturally level, the low-emotion composition of someone who was investing most of their energy in fine detail work. 

“He’s an asshole. I know we all already knew that, but there’s seeing all of this and hearing about him, and then there’s actually - _him_.” Keith wasn’t really sure how to articulate what Zarkon’s presence was like when you had his direct attention, and wasn’t going to put any effort into it when he was trying to avoid talking about anything Zarkon had said or pulled on and when he was holding part of the Castle’s reactor core. 

“If what I got of your nightmares is even a little bit of it…” Hunk grimaced behind his visor, before going quiet for a minute while he needed a more awkward angle for the tools. “That’d be enough to fuck up anybody. It’s amazing Shiro survived being stuck where he was with that for so long and is still as together as he is.”

“Yeah.” He was still hyper-aware of the reactor core, but his voice had softened; at least Hunk had redirected away from having him cornered, and onto something he worried about. “He doesn’t really seem to get that, either - when I do manage to call him on things, he acts like he’s ashamed of anything that lets on how much he got hurt, but I’m not sure I would’ve even survived what he went through.” The arenas, probably, but Hagar, the Druids, and Zarkon’s personal attention, while trapped and at their mercy?

“I kinda wonder if we could find a way to use the whole seeing-in-each-other’s-head thing to get it across, you know? Just sorta shove across how amazing he is even with it or what he looks like to the rest of us or something.” 

Keith nodded, stiff for trying to make sure he didn’t move his hands while Hunk worked. “That’s…not a bad idea. I’m not really sure how to do it, but if we can figure it out…” It’d be worth giving up a few boundaries if it worked, and he hadn’t really thought about actually trying to use the whole thing to communicate; Red had a faint purr at the idea, although there was something else she seemed to think was funny about the entire thing not having occurred to him that he couldn’t get clear while he was trying to keep focus on not moving. It was the loudest when the lions were together as Voltron, but that was also usually a time when they all needed to be focused on what was going on right that moment; some point where they were all in the lions but not in combat would probably be the best chance once he got a clue how to try and shove something over. They’d already clonked heads that way once.

“Are you sure you’re okay, though? I mean, you got chewed on too, and that seemed like it hurt pretty bad.” Definitely worried, even if it was a little muted by attention paid to work.

He made a couple awkward noises, not sure how to answer and still trying to avoid moving. “I…guess? I think the worst of it’s settled, I’m just… still figuring some things out.” He did appreciate the concern, even if it was awkward and made him feel weirdly small and vulnerable and made of raw nerves, but he was definitely not ready to talk to Hunk about not being human while he was still trying to get used to not flinching about accepting that Hunk cared about him. 

“Anything we can help with?” Hunk only glanced away from his work briefly, almost painfully earnest. 

“Not really.” It wasn’t like it was the same as Pidge’s confession; he wasn’t even human, and was exactly what they’d been fighting.

Somehow, Hunk managed to stare around his work without interrupting it, and Keith began to regret accepting the call for ‘extra hands’, unable to get away from the funny feeling he’d made some kind of mistake and that Hunk wasn’t going to let it go so easily. “You’re at least talking to Shiro, right?”

“Yeah.” It might have been a raincheck on an explanation, but when he had a little more of his own head sorted out, he’d make good on it. 

“Alright. You know we’re here for you too, right?” Hunk actually paused, the tools holding still as he gave Keith a pointed look around the cord.

Keith nodded, wanting to lean back and away; he caught himself short of it with a glimpse of the blazing engine core not that far away. 

Hunk narrowed his eyes, focused on Keith for a few long seconds, then returned his attention to his work, making a couple last checks. He put down his tools and reached up to tug Keith’s wrists, letting the connector snap shut on the cable. 

“Alright, that should do it. You can let go now.”

Keith let out a sigh of relief, pushing the cable at Hunk.

 

*****

The nightmares hadn’t stopped, even if a little bit of the urgency had faltered. If anything, the initial shock starting to wear down and blunt had just made things messier, since there started being openings for things that weren’t his to leak in again. The few days spent finding out of the way spots to work on the ship didn’t help. He had little to do but wander the ship, terrorize the training drones, and occasionally spar with Allura or get kidnapped to be extra hands by Coran and the others, which was plenty of time for nagging things to crawl back out of the depths, and he apparently wasn’t the only one; stumbling into dreams of the others' homes on Earth burning was bad enough, and he could only hope they either hadn't spotted him or didn't clearly remember enough to pick out that he'd been leading part of the Galra assault force in the nightmare.

The worst part with Shiro was that there was just enough overlap in Zarkon’s direction and fears of getting used for a couple of incoherent slurries of some of his nightmares with bits he was pretty sure were Shiro’s. Hagar was not something he’d ever directly encountered; he knew where that came from, and things got too vivid when something of Shiro’s tangled in.

The stifling added layer of “Zarkon is close, far too smug, and paying attention” in the nightmares was something he could do without; when he ‘woke up’ to the Castle dark and making suspicious low-power noises, it was only the awareness of teeth and claws that tipped him off he was dreaming. He bit his tongue to check that the sharper teeth weren’t hurting like they should’ve when he found Pidge, dead, almost beheaded, and apparently ambushed before she’d even had time to register that there was a threat. 

He wasn’t close enough to make out more than yelling voices, but he could still recognize Lance and Hunk, and the somewhat louder report of Hunk’s bayard with the echoing noise of shots glancing wild off the walls of the Castle; it went quiet before he got close, and he was quietly hoping that it wasn’t actually a shared nightmare. 

There was no sign of Shiro, but there was the almost hyper-real edge that came from Shiro’s nightmares. He knew Zarkon was on the bridge, and if it’d just been him, he would’ve gone the opposite direction, stubbornly turning the nightmare into making Zarkon chase him in the hopes it’d get ridiculous enough to break or at least let him flip the dictator the bird in his dreams somewhere, but he had the sinking feeling that Shiro probably wouldn’t realize it was a dream and would be in pursuit on Allura’s behalf.

That assumption got edited fast after he caught a tell-tale high-pitched hum as he rounded a corner, shield up and throwing himself out of the way on reflex. 

Yelling at Shiro that it was a nightmare worked about as well as before, but he’d learned one thing from the last time they’d been lucid in a nightmare like this, and that was there being another way to jar someone out of it that he bet would work - 

Or at least, it was an idea; he wasn’t sure if it was fighting with his own semiconscious restraint or just being that outmatched, but Shiro was still hard to land anything on and able to press him pretty hard even when he was trying to go for blood. 

By the time he realized Shiro’d managed to get past his guard and through the shield, the prosthetic was buried in his chest; he clung to consciousness, stubbornly throwing his awareness that it was a dream against every ounce of the nightmare insisting he should be “dying”. It wasn’t working very well; everything was dimming out and _hurt_ , and he could hear his bayard deactivating in his hand.

“Goddamnit, Shiro, _wake up_ -“, he managed to growl through his teeth, hitting Shiro’s breastplate with the inactive bayard; it glanced off, and ended up resting at the top of the breastplate, vaguely near the opening in front of the collar.

If he was going to lose the fight to keep a grip where he could try to shake Shiro out of it, then it wasn’t worth focusing on that; instead he forced the dream-bayard to reactivate with the last shreds of hold on the nightmare, blade snapping forward.

He got into the hallway outside his room just in time to run into Hunk and Lance; from the lingering confusion on Lance’s part, he suspected Hunk had taken a minute to check on Lance first and Lance was still sorting out what was going on.

He didn’t say anything to either of them, just turning to stalk towards Shiro’s door; he heard Pidge’s door open and a “Okay why is _everyone_ \- what’s going on?” as he opened the door to Shiro’s room. 

Lance and Hunk were following, Hunk grimly determined and Lance starting to follow suit; Pidge trailed after, still bewildered but picking up that something was important. 

Shiro flinched when the door opened, flattening against the wall at the end of the bed, pulling his good hand away from checking his own throat; he still looked disoriented, recognition of who was clustered in the door not even fully forming until Keith was in the room. 

It didn’t seem to fully register until Keith was halfway climbing over him; he tried to pull the mechanical arm out of the way, but was a little too late, and was still over-cautious of it enough that when Keith leaned back to pin it against the wall, wedging in between him and the side wall, he gave up rather than push Keith out of the way. 

Before he could protest that, Hunk was sitting on his legs, removing any possibility of him getting away; Lance somehow managed to fit himself along the other side from Keith, an arrangement that only dubiously fit on the narrow cot-bed. 

Shiro hadn’t gotten more than faint noises of protest before he gave up, leaning his head back and resigning himself to it. 

Pidge was still in the doorway, looking lost.

“Did you manage to dodge getting pulled in?”, Keith asked, tiredly blunt.

“Pulled in on what?”

“Nightmares”, Hunk answered, and Shiro ducked his head, trying to look away.

Pidge wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know? I mean… I had this really vivid dream where the power on the Castle cut out, and I was trying to run a diagnostic on the engine from one of the wall panels, then I noticed something behind me and just…woke up suddenly with this feeling something was really, really wro…ng….” She trailed off, rubbing the back of her neck and catching Shiro’s increasing expression of queasy guilt. She gave both Lance and Keith sharp questioning looks as the easiest ones in line of sight.

Keith spoke up fast; short, simple, and blunt would probably be easier on Shiro’s nerves and over quicker than letting Lance answer. “Shiro has nightmares about them getting control and making him kill everyone.” 

Pidge took a tired minute to process, then held up a hand. “One second, I need to go get something.”

The door closed behind her, and Keith elbowed Shiro in the ribs. “Not your fault.”

“What he said.” Lance was squirming a little trying to work out how to be half-draped over Shiro and on the cot without falling off if anyone shifted, and with some minimum of completely awkward; it wasn’t working very well. “We’ve all got our own screwed-up creepy nightmares at this point anyway.” 

Shiro shrank a little. “Not like that.” Most of the others had nightmares about things like their homes burning to the Galra or their families getting caught in the crossfire.

“You’re not even the only one on _that_ anymore.” Hunk put a hand on Keith’s knee, narrowing his eyes and giving just enough of a lean to make it impossible to miss who he was looking at; Keith shrank a little more into where he was wedged, limited and made a little more uncomfortable by the metal arm under his back. He didn’t want to know how much had been overheard, but…

“Since Zarkon, yeah”, he mumbled; Shiro would have no problem hearing it, and that was the point anyway - Shiro wouldn't judge him for it, and that meant he could leverage it against Shiro trying to hate himself for similar fears. 

The door opened again; Pidge had her laptop and messenger bag, two of the mice on her shoulders. She didn’t seem to pay attention to whatever she was interrupting, hopping up to sit on Shiro’s legs leaning against Hunk almost and starting up the computer, one end of an Altaean cable passed to Keith. 

Keith squirmed a hand free to get it, staring at it blankly.

“I know it’s probably just nightmares and trauma and all, but I thought I could check the arm to make _absolutely_ sure Ulaz kept any malicious code like what Hunk talked about before out.” She was mostly looking at the laptop and the attachment she’d plugged into the side as she spoke; Shiro blinked a couple times, then nodded, smiling faintly.

“Thanks.”

“You saw how that hooked up before, right Keith?” Pidge glanced up at him, suddenly still; he nodded. 

He had to twist around awkwardly to let Shiro pull the arm over and away from where he’d pinned it; Hunk was on his legs as much as Shiro’s, which limited movement and wasn’t something he was going to complain about when it meant someone else keeping close while Shiro was rattled. Hunk still shifted weight enough for him to get loose; it turned out to be the better idea, since it meant he could go from wedged into the wall and suddenly half behind Shiro, to sitting sideways with his legs draped over Shiro and Lance, the prosthetic arm resting in his lap where he could easily help Pidge. 

He had been present, but he hadn’t been directly helping with opening the panels on the arm, and he found himself fumbling to make sense of the small catches and mechanisms around one of the larger plates; one of the mice ran down Pidge’s arm to sit on his hand, twisting to reach around his fingers and get at the smaller parts.

“Thanks, Chulatt”, Pidge mumbled over her setup; once it was open, he had no trouble remembering how to hook up the cable, Chulatt sitting on the edge of the opening watching in case there was any more need for help, while Plachu hopped down onto Pidge’s wrist, watching the lines of code scroll by intently with occasional, very intentional nods. “This is going to take me a bit - I’ve got a lot of code to look through, and I’m relying a lot on secondary programs to translate and identify function that I need to babysit.” 

“Take your time.” Shiro already seemed less tense, shifting to the side just enough to make it a little easier for Lance.

Even with the dim lighting, it was a closer look at the internal mechanisms than he’d gotten before. There were odd, thick fibers filling part of the inside that tensed when Shiro shifted, almost contracting in a strange mockery of muscle fiber; metal structures curved separating parts of the inside, with odd cabling and circuitry etching glowing violet. The violet cords snaked out from something in the center. In a few places there was darker translucent cable that ran down from the elbow, most of it feeding into the same central structure the violet cables came out of; there was fluid within, red where the glowing parts came close enough to cut through the gloom, with some darker bluish lines woven in feeding back.

It uncomfortably brought to mind the Druid converting quintessence into something condensed and glowing violet - the arm apparently powering itself off of Shiro, blood running through it.

“So…does this happen often?” Lance was trying to act casual about it, but it wasn’t hard to tell he was worried. 

Shiro made a quiet, uncomfortable noise, looking for a way out that didn’t exist with everyone piled on or around him and his arm hooked up to Pidge’s computer; Keith raised an eyebrow at him.

“I dunno about the nightmares, but they kinda leak enough to know it’s pretty bad, especially since I’m probably not catching a lot of them.” Hunk _did_ manage to play it off mostly naturally, but the way he was looking at both Shiro and Keith when he said it made Keith suspect Hunk was close to becoming a mild terror at one or both of them over it. 

Shiro shrugged with a noncommittal noise. “It happens.” 

Keith elbowed him in the ribs again and everyone paused to stare at him, even Pidge glancing up from her work. 

“Look, if it helps, we could just take turns sleeping in here or something.” Hunk motioned to the entire group present, very matter-of-fact about it all.

Shiro grimaced. “I appreciate the offer but I’d…like to keep some illusion of privacy.” 

“Well, if you need it, you know we’re all okay with you wandering in, right?” Hunk might have focused that intent moment on Shiro, but Keith caught both a side glance at him and a tone that wasn’t going to allow any of the others to protest the idea. 

Shiro shrank down a little with a nod. Hunk accepted that with a tired sigh and a nod. 

There was silence until Pidge paused, letting out a breath. “Well…I’m having to work through using the Castle’s systems to read Galra code that’s had ten thousand years to evolve away from what went into building this place and then translating that through the laptop and getting Plachu and Green to double-check that I’m not missing anything, but we’re not seeing anything they think is worrying, so it looks like we’re good - Ulaz must’ve scrubbed any hostile overrides out of the system when it was made.” 

Keith nodded quietly, feeling another guilt-pang for the hostile paranoia he’d shown while Ulaz had been there. 

Shiro frowned, looking up at Pidge suspiciously. “…Any _hostile_ overrides?” 

“Oh, there’s an emergency shutdown code. I found that a long time ago, back in that weird sphinx’s trial, remember? It’s pretty hard to get at, at least. I had to use the interconnections between our armors as a middle interface to get access to even send it.” She waved a hand dismissively, not even looking up from closing down the connection. The cable to Shiro’s arm dimmed, the lights going out on it; Keith waited until Pidge said to take it out to unhook it, closing the casing. 

“You know while we’re making absolutely sure there’s nothing creepy left there…” Hunk rubbed the back of his neck. “Do you think it’s possible there’s any weird curses or anything from the creepy lady that would’ve survived the Castle’s healing pod?” 

Keith and Lance shared a worried glance, Shiro half-froze as that idea sank in, while PIdge had a near visible moment of mentally stalling out as she shut down her laptop, scrunching her face with a mutter of “Clarke’s third law, Clarke’s third law…”

“I think we’re dealing more with the corollary here”, Keith added drily, earning a filthy look. 

“I uh. You know I think we should ask Allura that one.” Pidge looked down to the mice; Plachu looked up, tilting his head, then nodded before darting off, vanishing into the dark room. 

There were a few minutes of silence; the late hour was starting to creep in and catch up, and Keith both caught himself nodding and noticed Lance starting to doze against Shiro’s shoulder, probably explaining how quiet Lance had been through a lot of it. Pidge set her laptop in its bag beside the bed, glasses slipped into the bag, and flopped back leaning fully against Hunk, who was leaning on the wall; he seemed to be the least likely to manage to drop off. 

Keith had no problem with shifting to just drape over Shiro, sprawling where he was. It made for more of an awkward tangle with Pidge also sprawled more at one end of the bed and Lance on the other side of Shiro, but the part of him that cared was getting increasingly smaller and easier to ignore. 

It didn’t go for very long before the door opened to Allura in a simple long slip-dress, Plachu on her shoulder; she paused in the dim light, one hand raised and mouth-half open, still in the doorway. Chulatt hopped over to Lance’s shoulder to wave, chattering something and waving at her to come in; Hunk couldn’t possibly see from where he was, but spoke up anyway.

“It’s okay Princess - we were all just really worried and didn’t want to leave him alone after that.”

Hunk’s voice was enough to wake Shiro up from being half-asleep, suddenly stiffening awkwardly; Keith stubbornly curled up more where he was, over and around the prosthetic arm, fully intent on not budging, and Lance cracked an eyelid with a quiet, confused mumble. 

“Ah. Alright.” She walked in enough for the door to close, standing beside the bed; the initial awkward moment was fading out into a fond smile. “Plachu said you wanted me to check to be sure there was nothing lingering after that assault?” 

“Yeah. He’s got pretty bad nightmares about Zarkon taking control and using him to kill everyone else here, and Pidge checked to make sure there wasn’t anything in his arm that could do that, but then I remembered Coran showing us how the Castle and the Black Lion were working on flushing out whatever that creepy lady’d left behind, and I figured it was worth making _really_ sure there was none of it left, just in case.” Hunk’s narration was starting to show bits of even him getting tired again, although Shiro tensed again with a few quiet attempts at sputtering at Hunk’s early explanation, which Hunk either didn’t notice or completely ignored. 

Allura nodded sympathetically, with a tiny awkward headtilt towards Shiro when his attempt at shutting down descriptions of his nightmares failed. 

“It seems like something where it’d be a good idea anyway, to have a person double-check what the machines did in case there were any errors”, Pidge added tiredly, not even opening her eyes. “If that’s a thing you can do, but I don’t think Plachu would’ve gone to get you if you couldn’t.” 

Allura tapped her chin thoughtfully. “I should be able to? Father and Mother were teaching me how to use magic, although… I’ve never had much opportunity for more than simple practice.” 

Shiro looked away; Keith knew the 'I don't want to be a burden' face. “…It - …” 

Hunk cleared his throat, and Keith tapped a finger on the prosthetic hand; Pidge cracked an eyelid open to glare at him. Shiro blanched.

“…I’d appreciate anything you could do, Princess.” He half-mumbled quietly. 

Allura raised an eyebrow at them for a moment, but didn’t comment. “Then I’ll do my best. I would rather be sure there won’t be any further unpleasant surprises from that, myself.” She shifted a little closer to the bed, looking over the tangled pile they’d made of themselves. “You should mostly be alright, but it is much easier with some physical contact - Keith, if you could?”

He froze, nodded, and pulled back to half sit up and half wedge back in against the wall; Pidge folded her legs in. 

Allura carefully arranged herself to be sitting in front of Pidge, which meant that she was sitting on Lance as much as Shiro. The addition of new weight did manage to wake Lance up, first only getting a confused sleepy mumble, then an awkward squawk as Lance sat straight up, staring at Allura wide-eyed with a noticeable flush spreading across his face. 

Allura narrowed her eyes, lips thin and flat with a warning glare that promised missing limbs if there was one word, and Keith swore he saw her glowing inner pupils thin to slits for a moment before they re-expanded round in the dark room. 

Lance froze, back pressed against the wall behind him, only barely even breathing, and showed no inclination to move any time soon. 

She watched him for another beat until she was satisfied there wouldn’t be any flirting attempts or comments while she was working, then relaxed, returning her attention to Shiro, who was thoroughly uncertain about the whole thing, pressing into the wall a little himself. She only seemed half-focused on anything in the room, carefully resting her hands one over the other at the top of his sternum. 

There was a faint, soft warm white glow around her hands, tiny floating motes in it that drifted and sank towards Shiro, vanishing on contact. Shiro swallowed hard, tensing, jaw clenched; Keith caught the faint beginnings of the prosthetic’s high-pitched hum, although it never progressed past the barely noticeable edge of an activation sequence. He tugged the hand over, wrapping his own around it; he wasn’t sure how much good it would do, but he knew Shiro had mentioned having some feeling in it, and he did still have faith in Shiro’s own stops against harming any of them overriding it as long as Shiro was conscious. Lance’s attention had been caught by what Allura was doing, but it didn’t stop him from noticing Shiro tensing either, shifting to rest a hand on Shiro’s shoulder and squeeze; Hunk and Pidge could only peer over Allura’s shoulder, Pidge trying to sit up to see. Chulatt perked up, intent, then scrambled over to wedge against Shiro’s neck on one side, Plachu darting in on the other side. 

The beginnings of a panic freeze were almost a solid thing rattling on the edge of Keith’s mind, old fear and sense of threat growing their own teeth and claws; Allura’s power wasn’t the same, but Shiro’s only experience with anyone using magic was Haggar and her Druids.

There was a faint flicker through the external patterns on the arm, but it was dim and pale warm white, only barely there; there was an almost electric warmth in Keith's hands as the flicker passed through the hand itself, a faint brush past Keith’s awareness as Allura found where the boundaries were, just enough contact to tell who was where while she was focused on Shiro. 

He almost flinched back, but forced his own attention to stay on Shiro; everything else he had to worry about, anything she might see, was less important than making sure Shiro was okay, and Shiro would need them to stay close. 

Allura was making quiet, soft soothing noises, faint murmurs of “It’s alright, you’re safe now” and “We won’t let them touch you again” drifting in here and there.

Pidge was popping up over Allura’s shoulder still, worried, and Hunk had a hand on her shoulder, watching himself; Lance caught Keith’s attention with his own lost look of concern and a questioning headtilt toward Shiro, who was still tensed and visibly trying to focus on Allura’s face and fight down his own reflexes. Keith frowned down at Shiro’s mechanical hand, then shifted over to curl up against Shiro’s side, chin resting on Shiro’s shoulder. 

Lance nodded and gave Shiro’s shoulder another squeeze, then reached over to catch Shiro’s good hand, leaning in closer and adding his own “It’s okay, we’re all here” to Allura’s distracted attempts at comfort. 

Allura lost track of her mumbling, eyes half-closed and focused somewhere else, too intent to even seem to notice the rest of them anymore past the occasional boundary-brushes. The mechanical hand went less stiff in Keith’s hands, and some of the tension drained out of him, although he was still unfocused and a little too pale. 

Whatever she’d done, it seemed like things went easier after that, and a few minutes later she pulled her hands back, the glow vanishing as she wobbled a little regaining her bearings. Everyone’s attention shifted to her, waiting.

“Well. There weren’t more than fading shreds hiding in cracks, and those should be gone, now.” 

The tension left the room, Shiro sinking down with a sigh of relief that very nearly turned into an exhausted groan. Plachu climbed up to rest in the hollow of his collarbone, curling up, and Chulatt climbed around to start aggressively grooming at his hair. 

“I do apologize for being abrupt - if I’d known how badly that would rattle old wounds, I would’ve been more careful.” 

Shiro gave a small, off-key half-laugh, watching the ceiling. “I didn’t expect it to bother me like that, either.” 

“I knew they were twisting things unnaturally, but…” She frowned, staring off at some distant point with a flicker of frustrated anger. “There truly is nothing sacred to them anymore, if they’ve even found ways to corrupt forms of magic meant to support and heal.” 

Keith looked up, staying close with his chin still on Shiro’s shoulder; Shiro half-froze and Lance gave a worried, “Princess…?”

She sighed, leaning back against Hunk next to Pidge, who settled in against her wearily. 

“I think they tore out more pieces of spirit than they did flesh.” The frown passed into a brief scowl. “It isn’t nearly as bad as it must have been when you first escaped, but I could find many half-healed scars, lingering cracks more than I could repair without a great deal of energy and time, and places where the Black Lion has been working to shore things up and make its own patches over and repairs.” 

Lance and Hunk had visible shudders, and Keith and Pidge winced; Shiro tiredly sighed with a resigned eyeroll. “I believe it.” Then, after a thoughtful pause, “…It’s been what again?”

“Filling in holes with pieces of its own energy, stitching bits back together and helping things heal. Also lent some assistance to ensuring all of the hag’s handiwork was removed. To be honest, I think you're best off letting the lion help it heal from here; it's far more deft with far more power behind it than I am.” It was enough of a distraction from the other horrors for her to relax some. 

Shiro nodded, closing his eyes with a faint, wry smile. “…Thank you, Princess.” 

She gently patted his shoulder, then stood, carefully picking herself out of their tangle. “I’m glad I was able to do something for that.” She bowed. “We should all be getting back to sleep, however.” 

“No kidding. I’m exhausted.” Lance yawned; Hunk muttered a tiny “damnit” and yawned himself a moment after. 

“G’night, Princess.” Pidge stretched, curling up back where she was.

Keith lifted his head from where he was resting. “Thanks, Princess.” 

She smiled faintly, and left the room. 

“…Hunk. Can you…?” Shiro gave a weak, uncomfortable half-smile, and Keith noticed him trying to tug his legs loose; rattled nerves were a bad time to not be able to move. Hunk startled, taking a moment to stare down.

“Oh. Sorry.” He put a hand out to steady Pidge, who grumbled but shifted herself, and levered up enough for Shiro to pull his legs free. 

There were a few minutes of awkward wrangling, Hunk curling around the foot of the bed against that wall with Shiro’s feet resting on his legs, Pidge curling up where she was using Hunk as a pillow, and Keith ending up the one with Hunk half pinning him down; he grumbled faintly but accepted it, staying put, while Lance settled back where he’d been, somehow managing to be in the easiest position despite being on the edge. 

There was a dim, faint dream; it was one of the sitting rooms rather than any quarters, but there was just as much of an exhausted tangle, if with more bruises and being more battered, one much bigger frame in the middle with an odd contented rumble that had an undertone almost like small bones rattling off each other. There were five different grumbles and groans at the lights coming up that settled a little when they dimmed again, and a bemused female voice.

“So this is where you’ve been.” 

“Meant to get back, just…” Alfor didn’t sound nearly as apologetic as he was aiming for; there was neither the desire nor the energy to move far enough to leave the room.

The odd rumble dimmed. “None of us have slept more than maybe a varga or two in three quintents. We’re not moving.” Zarkon’s attempt at being firm was too tired to have any force to it, and ended up almost petulant. 

“Allura woke up and went looking for you; she fell asleep again in the hangar. She’s back in bed.” 

“That’s great. Gives us time to figure out what not to tell her.” That voice was muffled against the couch cushion.

“You mean try to leave out the best parts.” Whoever’d said that got elbowed or kneed with a quiet and completely unrepentant “oof”; there was a faint chuckle from Zarkon. 

“I’ll go get some blankets. I’ll be right back.” Allura’s mother was laughing to herself on her way out of the room.

Keith woke up when something under his head tugged out of the way, leaving him curled up on Shiro; miraculously, nobody had fallen off the bed that was definitely not meant to hold three people, much less five, even if Pidge probably only counted for a half. Pidge was half sprawled over him, Hunk had apparently tried to hug him and Pidge and ended up half-wrapped and half-draped around both of them, Shiro, and one of Lance’s legs, and Lance had curled up around Shiro’s other arm and shoulder. Shiro seemed to still be asleep, and actually looked content and relaxed.

Lance was also squinting blearily at his own wrist. “…You left _teethmarks_.” He stared between his wrist and Keith in mild disbelief; the marks weren’t enough to even bruise, but were just enough to be lingering after Lance had pulled his hand back. 

“Yeah. He does that”, Shiro mumbled, amused and not bothering to move.


	21. Can it wash out in the water or is it always in the blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the cube went down, there isn't any chance for peace or rest on Olkarion, as the commander left a last act of petty spite before fleeing.
> 
> And the hasty evacuation left behind a few other worries.

They landed on the edge of the city after spotting Ryner’s mech; the central areas were still live war zones, the Olkari that had been trapped in the city more than happy to scavenge or improvise weapons to join the rebels coming in from the forest. Ryner was standing just outside the mech, in a ring of barely organized chaos with a few other Olkari also acting as commanders; runners with messages and small flying wooden insectoid drones with recordings came and went. A framework in the middle held up a sheet of some kind of organic material, bioluminescent spots forming a map of the city that responded to touch. Occasionally a ship could be seen leaving, the dark colors of Galra construction. Some were vaguely familiar shapes of smaller military pods and ships, but a few were silhouettes they hadn’t encountered.

The lions had to land a short distance away to avoid disrupting too much, Black in the middle of what had once been an outgoing street while the others found places around the buildings on the edge of the city. Shiro motioned to the others to stay there, running in himself to touch bases with Ryner without disrupting the Olkari’s mobile command center.

The more Keith watched, the more it was clear it was a mobile command, and one that not only had been planned and practiced, but something they had experience running. The only part that seemed harried was the numbers of runners and drones involved.

It wasn’t long after that for the Castle to land, a little further away in a larger clear space. Allura disembarked in armor, her staff collapsed in one hand. Coran followed after, staying close and casting nervous glances the direction of the city; Keith noticed he was wearing some kind of pistol-sized sidearm, and was keeping a hand resting on it. 

Ryner broke away, apparently delegating to one of the other Olkari and La Sai, judging by the man’s sudden deer in headlights expression as Ryner and Shiro walked away. La Sai was out of cuffs, but hadn’t even had time to do more than drape a coat over the black and pale dark purple slave’s garb. 

They all converged somewhere closer to the lions than to the Castle or the Olkari mobile command, Shiro reaching the Altaeans a little ahead of everyone else.

“Princess! We heard the battlecruiser stationed here already left - was everything alright?”

“We’re fine. They definitely saw us, but seemed to be in such a hurry to leave that they didn’t even target us.” Allura sounded mildly disgusted by it. “In fact, they altered course to stay out of _our_ range.” The Castle was far from helpless, but it did not stand up well one on one against a battlecruiser.

“Coward didn’t even bother staying to try to cover the smaller ships or civilian ships that’ve been leaving, either,” Coran added. “I can’t imagine that commander has much of a life expectancy after running away like that.” 

Ryner just nodded, unsurprised. “That sounds about like La Sai’s account of the commander as an individual.” She shook her head. “They took a handful of our engineers from the city with them, likely intended as a peace offering to bribe Zarkon out of any executions.” 

She didn’t seem to expect that to work.

“They seem to have started preparing to evacuate just before the cube was finished - and setting all of their drones to turn aggressive.” Ryner inclined her head toward the city. “There are only a few Galra stragglers, but with the way they rely on drones to bolster their numbers and how long they’ve been here…”

Allura nodded, giving the sounds of firefights a steely glare. “Then they were planning all along on turning that weapon against Olkarion had the Paladins not intervened - we arrived barely in time.”

“We’re almost certain that was the commander’s intent.” 

“I’m almost surprised Zarkon left Olkarion standing this long.” 

Ryner met Allura’s bitter grumble with weariness. “Our people were involved in the fighting when he turned on everyone else. After Altea fell, we were one of his priority targets - the Galra fleets systematically destroyed our colonies and outposts until he had us pinned down on our home world, at which point they established an occupation to keep us broken and contained. They’ve made a few attempts at exterminating those of us who fled to the forests, harshly enough that we learned to hide our cities and mask signs of our presence.”

“We didn’t know you were out there either until you brought the lions down,” Shiro commented, standing a little away; he was keeping wary of the city, and that had been enough cue for the others to spread out between the Princess’s meeting with Ryner and the street. Keith was perched on one of the Black Lion’s paws where he’d have a good ambush point on anything heading past, Pidge in an alcove of the building, and Lance and Hunk on either side of the road. 

Shiro staying visible and open with his back to the city was practically bait for a trap. 

“Once he had us contained, Zarkon seems to have wanted as little to do with us as he could. La Sai said the Commander had disgraced himself somehow once and was assigned here as a punishment.” 

“I wonder why.” Hunk was still mostly watching the city, bayard at the ready, but he was casting distracted glances back. A few of the others gathered looked over at him, Ryner giving him a curious glance. “Well, you people are super engineers, right? That seems like it’d be either pretty dangerous or really, _really_ valuable.”

“Maybe it was personal. Something he wanted to forget about, even if the planet was too valuable to just torch,” Lance mused. 

“I can’t imagine much that would’ve been a big enough deal to want to forget it for ten thousand years, unless one of the other Paladins was Olkari or something.” Keith could hear them well enough, but opted for using the helmet radio so he wouldn’t need to raise his voice enough to be heard by Allura, not wanting to give away his position. 

“And you answered your own question, I think.” Ryner closed her eyes, going silent after that; Allura looked away with a tangled and miserable expression, while Coran’s expression fell as he went subdued.

Keith was torn between keeping watch on the city in case the skirmishes with the automated drones came close to them and moving to be more easily involved in the conversation; Red certainly knew something, but the lion’s input was still not the clearest, a sense of distance, the echo of what it was like for one of the lines in the relay to sever suddenly when a Paladin died, and a marker of a point of no return being crossed, with a fragment of someone else’s sudden shock and grief at the unexpected severance. 

It had been unexpected, they had been the first of the old team to die, it hadn’t been anywhere near where Red and her Paladin were, and it was when the others realized how far gone Zarkon really was. 

A sudden shape ran under the Black Lion, straight between the massive creature’s legs and paws; Keith turned fast, freezing half poised to lunge as the small figure’s erratic darting registered as ‘child’ before he got a look at them. 

They had frozen a few feet short of running into Shiro, staring up at him, dark clothes turned dingy with lighter colored dirt and dust. Dark violet fur was interrupted in a few places by slate grey scales, pointed ears angled back flat; it was definitely a child, all pre-adolescent awkward proportions, even if they were almost Pidge’s height.

Shiro took his helmet off, holding it behind his back with the prosthetic, and held up his good hand; he only got halfway into kneeling down to their eye level with a soft “It’s okay-” before they tried to bolt again, back toward the city.

Keith dove off Black’s paw in a rolling tackle, taking the brunt of the impact with the ground on his own shoulder. He came up with a squirming, struggling armload that was growling with bits of high-pitched rusty-hinge sounds, kicking back at his armor and chewing angrily on his vambrace.

Shiro was still standing where he’d been, dumbfounded and looking somewhere between shock, guilt, and a wounded sag.

The kicking was proving mostly ineffective, dull thuds against the armor that probably would’ve hurt if he hadn’t been wearing it; apparently even the less solid parts of it still had an ability to absorb shock and impact. He was starting to get concerned about the chewing, but not for the sake of his wrist.

“Look, you’re not going to chew through that, but you might hurt your teeth.” He didn’t expect the kid to trust them - the kid had no reason to, and with what was going on, was probably lost, separated from any family or orphaned, in the middle of suddenly hostile live fire, on top of probably growing up told that anything not-Galra was the enemy.

And Keith could only imagine what the Official Story going around about the Paladins of Voltron was among the Empire. 

The gnawing didn’t really stop but there was a more frustrated growl to it. 

Lance walked over, taking his helmet off and setting it down on one of Black’s paws.

“Hey there.” Lance leaned down just enough to be closer to eye level for the kid, close enough for Keith to give him an unsure frown. “We’re not going to hurt you.” He was being quiet, gentle, and calm, attention entirely on the child, who stopped gnawing on Keith’s wrist to bare teeth at him in a snarl. Lance, to his definite credit, was sharp enough to mind not showing teeth when he smiled. “I know things are pretty ba-”

The child swiped, raking claws across Lance’s face; there was a light splatter of blood, red lines opening up across Lance’s nose, cheek, and brows. He only barely flinched, closing his eyes, and stayed still for a deep breath.

“…Ow.” It was a simple statement, accompanied with the faint wince-grimace of Lance being well aware he should’ve seen that coming. The Galra child snarled, some of their fur puffing out.

Lance stood up, wiping blood out of his eyes, squinting through it.

“Are you alr-”

Keith didn’t get through the question before the child suddenly twisted, shoulders shifting inward in a way humans wouldn’t be capable of, taking advantage of the brief distraction to get loose and run. 

Back toward the city, where there was still the commotion of live fire.

Pidge darted out with a “Hey, wait!”, not quickly enough to actually catch them; she gave Keith a helpless look of worry as he dashed past, running after them, Lance only slowed down behind him by jamming his helmet on. 

It was taking almost all of his attention to keep track of the smaller shape trying to get away; the city buildings were mostly intact, a few left-behind barricades and blackened scars from skirmishes here and there, mangled drones and an occasional Olkari corpse scattered in the street. From the sound of things, while the fighting had moved on from this area, it was still ongoing and not nearly far enough away.

He heard Lance’s armor thrusters firing behind him, Lance opting for higher ledges and rooftops where he’d have a clear view; the others were on the radio.

“Fan out - it looks like we need to make sure the area’s secure.” Shiro, definitely already running after.

“Damnit. Don’t try and go after them too close, Shiro, I know you want to but don’t!” Pidge probably wouldn’t be too far from wherever Shiro was; there was a display appearing on the visor, relative positions to each other visible on it, Pidge moving out to one side while Hunk was going around the other direction, Shiro behind him somewhere.

Shiro just made a questioning noise over the radio.

“Remember what Kythylian said? The kid’s probably more terrified of you than the rest of us.” 

Shiro’s dot on the readout stopped dead at that, staying still.

Another dot appeared on radar, pale warm white; he didn’t have time to think about it too hard.

The kid had darted around a corner; it turned out to be a short alleyway that opened onto a street more cluttered with debris from the fighting. He had a brief moment of panic - he wasn’t sure which way they’d run - then Lance came over the radio before he’d cleared the alleyway entirely. “Keith, right!” 

Where he couldn’t keep sight, Lance had a better vantage point. He knew when they reached an area where there was ongoing fighting when a rifle shot from above took down a drone that had been taking aim at him; between cover fire and directions, it was easy to tell he’d have never been able to do this alone.

He still had to curse inwardly; they didn’t know the city well enough to herd the kid in somewhere out of the open, and the longer the chase went on, the more likely one of them was going to get hurt, and it would probably be the small, unarmored target. Pidge, Hunk, Shiro, and the other mark on radar were moving in around their area, noticeably slowed when they hit the live fire zone. 

He’d been focused enough on the chase that other radio chatter had barely registered, but it was beginning to sink in that Allura was on the radio actively, with Coran audible in the background sounding panicked and frustrated.

The street was wider, but more of a mess; several buildings had their sides ripped and broken apart, debris being used as makeshift barricades by both the Galra drones and the Olkari; Lance was kept busy, and he had to carve through a couple of drones on the run to keep up.

“Sharp right, inside!”

He was briefly thankful that they finally had a more enclosed space to deal with, until he realized it was one of the more torn up buildings; there was light gunfire from the inside and he wasn’t sure which side or if that mattered right now. He did spot the child, running for a back corner of the gutted first floor, and charged after.

He caught just enough movement as he passed to register an armed Olkari turning, tracking the same target; he was close enough to dive, using the thrusters to close distance faster and get in the way, throwing himself over the kid.

One shot impacted off the back shoulder of his armor, throwing up damage alarms on his visor; he twisted around with a growl, curling around the child under his shield.

The Olkari was already down, scrabbling away from the opening with their weapon and the hand it’d been on a burned wreck. 

The Galra child had stopped struggling, clinging to the breastplate of his armor in mute shock. He shifted them as best he could; it was awkward, but he could carry them with the shield up covering in front. He couldn’t do anything else and the shield was too close to be mobile, but it was better than nothing. 

“I have them. They’re okay.” He wasn’t standing or moving yet, although he did shoot the wounded Olkari a venomous glare through the shield.

“Are you alright? Your armor says you took a hit.” There was apparently just enough other information going across that Shiro didn’t sound too worried. 

“Yeah, just scorched up the armor a bit. I’m fine. Some asshole tried to shoot the kid.”

The Olkari wedged behind some kind of broken furniture a little further; he’d apparently gotten the point across that they were lucky he couldn’t get his sword out without putting the child at risk. 

He could make out the different tone of Lance’s rifle in among the rest of the firefight; it sounded less active than when he’d run for the building, but still definitely active. 

“Lance - I need to get back to the mobile command, but I can’t fight like this. I’m gonna need you to cover me.”

“Roger that.” 

He took a couple breaths to gather himself, then got to his feet and started running, trying to retrace as much as he could and use the lions’ locations on his visor for reference points where that wouldn’t work. They definitely got aimed at a few times, but the couple of times there were too many targets for Lance to take out before they could fire, Lance managed to gauge angles well enough for the enemy shots that did get off to bounce off Keith’s shield. 

He wasn’t sure if it was a good or bad sign that the kid was staying quiet, but they definitely seemed to be willing to try to stay put, so it was some kind of progress.

The other four were slower to fall back, Allura and Coran closer behind him than the others. Ryner had returned to the mobile command, looking up expectantly as they returned, Lance coming down off a high ledge behind Keith in the lead. Allura arrived at almost the same time, cutting in from an alleyway; Coran didn’t holster his own weapon until they were well clear of the buildings, and looked distinctly frazzled. 

He was perfectly happy to wait at the edge of the mobile command while Allura and Coran headed to the center of it. The Galra child was still quiet, occasionally staring at him strangely; they were starting to get heavy, but he didn’t know how long them being cooperative would last, and didn’t really want to risk something startling them and them bolting again. 

Lance pulled off his helmet, making his best attempt at wiping blood out of his eyes; the claw marks weren’t dangerous, but had caught just deep enough across his forehead to be bleeding more than enough to be a hindrance. 

One of the Olkari broke away after rifling in a small case, handing Lance a damp cloth and waiting with some kind of small device, modified plant life that now would have almost blended in among any metal based tech. As soon as he had the worst of the blood cleaned away, they told him to hold still, running part of the device close over the scratches in his face; Keith couldn’t get a good look beyond some kind of faint light, the claw marks healing clean as it faded. 

“There. It might still be a little tender for a few hours, but it should be healed.” 

Lance ran a couple fingers over where the marks had been. “Thanks. Here I was thinking I’d gotten past all kinds of crazy shit and my first real scar would be from being dumb with a kid.” 

He was good humored about it; one of the child’s ears ticked a little, and they narrowed their eyes at Lance with a small, uncertain noise Keith could barely hear.

Pidge trailed out of the city to join them, Shiro not far after. Shiro walked to stand by Keith’s shoulder in habit, but froze when the child shrank down with another rusty noise, trying to put Keith between them and Shiro. Shiro stopped in the middle of going to say something, shrinking back and edging away. Hunk caught up and wandered over a little after, peering over Keith’s shoulder with a smile and a wave that earning a scrunch down and a wary look in return. 

“Aww. Still scared? It’s okay.” Hunk two large steps back, holding up his hands. “See? I’m over here now.” 

The kid’s head popped up a little to stare at him in confusion.

La Sai suddenly stood from whatever communications device he’d been bent over, projecting his voice over the noise; everyone else went quickly silent.

“We’ve retaken everything around the central command tower. If we can get into it, we can claim the central controls for the drones and automated systems.” 

There was a quiet, tentatively hopeful murmur passing between the gathered Olkari; almost all of the opposition was automated, and the system in that building would shut most of it down. 

Allura looked over to them and Shiro; Shiro nodded. Allura turned to Ryner. “We’re willing to assist with retaking the building; the Paladins can spearhead the assault with little risk of casualties against Galra drones.” 

“We thank you for the help. It should put an end to the fighting for now, and give us time to rebuild and prepare.” 

Zarkon was likely to try to reclaim Olkarion sooner or later, or some stray ambitious commander would look to it as a potential feather in their cap; that much was a given. 

There wasn’t really enthusiasm from them on it, although there was no argument or complaint; as much as this was turning into a marathon, nobody wanted to walk away and leave the Olkari when they were still fighting. Ryner’s people could probably finish the job, but there’d be more casualties without them. 

Ryner turned, barking orders two or three directions; La Sai and a few of the other forest-dwelling Olkari gathered to her, while the rest of the group around the mobile command rearranged to cover them leaving. When Ryner’s group broke away toward the Paladins, Coran froze, watching Allura, then had a moment of visible relief when she didn’t break away to follow, instead staying involved in the mobile command area. 

Shiro was carefully minding giving Keith - and the child - space, but met Ryner with confusion. “You’re coming with us?” 

“Of course. The faster we can shut down the drones, the better. It may take us time to get past their species locks, but-”

Shiro held up his right hand; there was a quiet hum as part of the system came online, just enough for a faint violet glow. “I can handle that.” 

Ryner paused, staring at it visibly mentally re-orienting. “Very well then. It does still leave one other worry.” Her voice had softened as she turned just enough to look over Keith’s direction.

“They can stay in Red. She’ll look after them, and it’ll honestly be one of the safest places on the planet right now.” 

Ryner nodded thoughtfully, then returned her attention to Shiro. “In that case, we’re ready as soon as you are.”

Shiro motioned to follow; the Olkari with Ryner did split up some, two going to Green with Pidge, while another few went to Blue nearby, Ryner and La Sai staying with Shiro. 

The way the child squirmed around to sink into him and stare up at the lion was enough to make him wonder if Galra had solid bones before a certain age. There was definitely a flinch when Red’s eyes flared on and the lion’s head turned and lowered, giant jaws opening. 

He stopped in the back of the cockpit. “Okay, I need to put you down.” It was enough warning for them to get to their feet easily, perching up on a ledge of the side wall while he settled in the pilot’s seat. He was going to be glad to get back to the Castle; carrying around someone almost Pidge’s size on top of the fight with the cube and everything else was exhausting.

There wasn’t even a real exchange needed; he knew from half of their fights in an atmosphere as Voltron that the lions _could_ control gravity inside enough to keep “down” the same direction no matter what, and Red already had it overridden while he had a passenger that might not know how to handle it without getting hurt otherwise. 

Blue was still cheerfully unrepentant about not activating that back on Earth.

“Can I get a name?”, he asked back, the cityscape flickering past on the screen.

There were a couple beats of silence, then a very small and hesitant, “Ralar.”

“My name is Keith. The guy who was covering us back there is Lance. The little one in green is Pidge, Hunk’s the really big one, and Shiro doesn’t like being called ‘Champion’.” 

“Why not?” They sounded genuinely confused by that.

“Because he never wanted to be in that arena, but he didn’t want people who were weaker getting thrown in more. He was taking on as many fights as he could so people that wouldn’t survive wouldn’t have to.” 

There was an odd silence for a couple moments while he was pondering spaces to land. 

“Who are the other two?” 

It probably was obvious enough that Allura and Coran were with them; they were the only non-Olkari involved in the mobile command. “That’s Coran and Princess Allura.”

“Princess of what?”

“Altaea.” 

There was a short thin hiss and a very quiet sound of scuffling for a moment; when Red landed and he stood to look back, Ralar had wedged into the corner of the piece of paneling they were sitting on, staring at him in confused suspicion.

He sighed; of course, with Zarkon’s apparent grudge against Altaea, the history had probably been rewritten spectacularly, and it was probably a lucky thing that this hadn’t come up with Allura actually present. “You know that when we went after you to make sure you didn’t get shot, they were with the others trying to cover the area.” He didn’t know how thrilled Allura was with having a Galra child around, but her trauma rattle did not go so far as to cloud her ability to parse a child as just that; he hadn’t gotten any suspicious looks and she hadn’t seemed irritated with them for it.

The others could deal with him taking a minute to make sure the kid was safe and at least not freaking out in the lion. The command tower wouldn’t go anywhere. 

The thin hiss turned into a rusty noise, and he was getting stared at again as though he were some kind of non-Euclidian surrealist smear.

“Why did you…”

If the kid’s family had been military or associated with the military, which was likely since it didn’t seem like there’d been a real colonization effort, then they’d probably grown up with the more extreme versions of the slanted propoganda rhetoric and whatever skewed standards were being made normal; turning everything into Us Against Them, the way the Empire had been functioning getting glorified and justified - and that apparently weighted a little in a ‘devour the weak’ and ‘compassion for others as weakness’ direction on top of anything non-Galra as the enemy.

He knew he could’ve said it was what they were supposed to do as Paladins; it wouldn’t be false, but if he was gauging equivalent ages right, he wouldn’t have bought it at that age, and it wouldn’t be the main reason for him either. 

“Because I’ve been the kid with nobody coming to help them, and I know how miserable it is.” 

They shifted, uncomfortably restless.

“Look, there’s a bigger space you can stay in; it’d be more comfortable than the cockpit, probably, even though there’s not much there.” He already knew the controls wouldn’t respond, so it wasn’t like there was any worry of Ralar managing to do anything to or with Red, but the cockpit wasn’t a very big room to be shut in. 

Of course, the central compartment in the lion’s ‘body’ wasn’t a place he’d really looked into much; it was mostly empty save for a few storage containers and wall panel storage spaces. He had no idea what was in any of it, and knowing that anything stowed there would’ve belonged to his predecessor meant he hadn’t yet gotten past it feeling like rifling through a strange dead person’s room right after the funeral. 

Ralar nodded, clambering off the piece of paneling to lurk behind him.

He brought the hammock with him, setting its clamps up in a corner of the central compartment; they seemed to take to finding a quiet corner and settling in easily enough. The door shut behind him, and Red gave him an assurance that she’d keep watch.

He stepped out of the lion’s jaws; Red had settled lying down, head close to the ground. There was still the sound of gunfire echoing off from the area around the tower, but it was almost too quiet in the area. 

The others and the Olkari team were waiting, gathered under the Black Lion for cover; the other three already had their particle barriers up, and Red’s went up as he walked away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Been having a really busy work/RL situation, so I'm a little flat outside of writing for destress!
> 
> I ended up spending way too much time thinking about the situation with Olkarion and the history there, as well as the occupation, and this snowballed way more than I was expecting. The Altaean's familiarity really does telegraph that it used to be important, which makes it a bit of an outlier for a lot of the other worlds they've stopped on.


	22. We're bent but not broken, and not dead yet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Paladins help shut down the automated defenses and retake the central control tower.
> 
> Then while Ryner and the others are sorting plans, Keith returns to dealing with their rescue. Red is a horrible babysitter, and Keith is increasingly unable to avoid how close to home the situation is hitting. 
> 
> (I'd say I don't know how these two chapters ended up this long but in retrospect it's more that I didn't think ahead near far enough about what I was doing to who here and OF COURSE it would be this big of a deal for Keith. There will be more time with the Olkari later, though!)

Shiro and Pidge had the front door open quickly. At first Pidge stayed back with the Olkari, patching her gauntlet’s computer into the tower’s system to bring up maps and security. 

“Okay, it looks like there’s going to be two terminals partway up we need to hit, a main control and a backup. I think we can override the doors leading to the backup, but the main control room has three doors between it and us with species lock settings not connected to the network, and it looks like it might also have some mechanical security measures that aren’t on the network, either.” 

Shiro was leaning into the hallway, violet light from his prosthetic cutting gloom where the lights were turned down. “Can you track the drones from there?” 

“Yeah, mostly. I think there might be a subsystem on that main room that isn’t entirely on the networks, I’m not sure.”

“There’s a few disconnected systems, actually - to make it harder for one of us to interfere with the system,”, La Sai added, uneasily watching the area around them with one of the plant-based firearms on his arm. “Most Olkari allowed in the central building had shackles with extra systems added to interfere with our powers, but there’s been a few breakins over the history of the occupation. They're mostly booby traps, though, and shouldn't be linked to the drones.”

Pidge groaned. 

“Alright. We can still do this.” Shiro waved the others that were still by the lion to the door. “Hunk, you come with me; we’ll head for the main control room. Keith, Lance, you two will aim for the backup. Pidge, you work with the Olkari to get everything open; if that main control is the master, then anything left after should just be clean-up.” 

“I’ll send the maps to your armor, it should show up on your visors.” Pidge settled cross-legged on the ground, Ryner nearby with a hand on the wall; Ryner was focused on whatever she was doing, completely lost to the verbal conversation. 

A couple seconds later there was a faint chirp, the outline-map for that floor on the visors, and Shiro was moving with a “Let’s go!”; Hunk was not far behind him, and Keith took off for the first marker on his map, Lance running after to keep up. 

For part of the way up, he lapsed into rote focus; follow Pidge’s directions, waymarkers, and maps, carve through drones guarding points that Lance hadn’t managed to hit on the way in, occasionally stop on a landing for a few moments so Lance could catch up.

Then there was some kind of small side room they routed through, and he barreled through the door to find an actual Galra soldier in armor, startled out of attention on a computer screen and fumbling to grab at their rifle. 

The soldier had tried to step back and run into the console, teeth showing in an failed intimidation attempt; Keith stopped, shield raised, and they froze, grip on the rifle not entirely solid. 

Lance stopped beside him with his bayard raised; after a second or two passed in silence, he stood straight, lowering the weapon and gesturing to the computer screen behind the soldier with his free hand.

“Missed the last boat out, eh?” 

The soldier almost nervously glanced at the console, but didn’t want to look away from them, most of it focused on Keith. 

Lance tapped his foot a couple times. “Okay, look. I actually don’t really want to shoot you, and I don’t think you want to try to shoot us right now, either. Why don’t you just put that down and surrender, and I’ll radio back to make sure you’re treated decently.”

The Galra soldier shifted weight, and looked nervously between Lance and Keith, focusing a little more on Keith who still had his sword ready, wary.

“Oh, Keith will absolutely stab you if you don’t surrender,”, Lance continued. 

There were another couple beats, and then the soldier dropped the rifle, raising empty hands. 

“Alright, that’s better! Our people are down by the door. Don’t try anything dumb, the others are in the tower too.” Lance stepped aside, motioning with his bayard toward the door behind them; Keith took the cue, lowering his sword and stepping back, shield still up. 

The soldier was jittery all the way to the door, and they could both hear him break into a run after it closed behind him. 

Lance was immediately on his radio, while Keith peered around the other door. “Hey guys? So we just got a surrender. He’s in armor but unarmed and heading for the door, I kinda gave my word that he _would_ be treated decently, you’re all going to honor that, right?” He actually sounded testy and suspicious on the last part, half-glaring off into the distance as he talked into the helmet. 

Ryner came on over their radio, something that got Keith’s attention and confusion; as far as he knew, she didn’t have a way to do that, unless she was doing some kind of roundabout circuit through where Pidge’s armor was patched into the tower. “I’ll make sure of it. Carry on.”

“And I’m still down here, so I’ll keep an eye on things, too,” Pidge added.

“Alright, thanks guys!” Lance dropped his hand, readying his rifle again, and Keith returned to tearing through the hallways up. 

There wasn’t more than drones and doors the rest of the way up; Keith made it into the room with the backup controls at a run, heading for the terminal, warning lights of multiple drones coming in from other parts of that side of the tower. “LANCE GET THE DOORS!” 

Lance could get them before they reached the door, and maybe get it sealed; he made for the console, not looking back to check, half-noting the sound of gunfire behind him. 

He put a hand on the activation panel before he’d even stopped to think about not knowing what he was supposed to do with it, and a moment later when it came on, he prayed that Pidge had either already deactivated any potential locks or wasn’t paying attention there yet. Lance was preoccupied with keeping drones from getting into the room.

“Okay, I’ve got the console, now what do I do with it?”

“Already?” 

Crap.

“Okay, the lockbreaker must’ve worked faster than I’d thought. Just, hold that room until Shiro and Hunk get the main control room, okay? Once they shut that down, it’s going to try to fall back to the terminal you’re at.” 

“We’re just reaching the room, we’ll have it secured in a minute,” came over the radio from Shiro, the sound of Hunk’s bayard firing in the background. 

The noise level behind him spiked, the doors closed, and then he looked back just in time to see Lance shooting out the mechanisms.

A beat later, Lance looked at both doors he’d just sealed shut.

“…You can cut through those, right?”

Keith had to stifle laughter at Lance’s realization that he’d just sealed them in; Lance glared at him.

“Yeah, I can get us out.” And even if he did have a hard time, he was pretty sure Shiro could get it open once the drones were gone; there was the sound of occasional shots impacting off the door. Left long enough, they’d get through eventually, but from Shiro and Hunk’s position on the map readout on the visor, the system would be shut down before they got more than a small hole in it. 

It didn’t stop Lance from getting distracted from fuming at him by watching the doors nervously, listening to the constant sound of fire hitting them. 

There were starting to be visible soft, heated spots in the door when Shiro called out that he had it; Keith was pondering if he’d need to help Lance buy breathing room when there was a brief pause in the drone’s gunfire, then Pidge calling out the main console being shut down. 

Keith turned back to the console. “What do I need to do?”

“Ryner and I can patch through your armor if you can get your hand back on one of the contact points.” 

He took a breath and put his hand on the console, trying not to worry about if either of them would see anything from any bioscanner in the console or if there was one. 

“Alright, I’ve got a connection. Just give us a second aaand…”

There was a flurry of Galran symbols across the console, then they stopped with a brief alarm buzz from the terminal, and the entire thing shut down; the sound of gunfire in the hallway stopped. Lance let out a long breath of relief, lowering his bayard. 

It was eerily silent, the distant echoes of gunfire in the city suddenly quiet. 

Keith did manage to carve the doors open; it was a little easier than he’d expected, mostly because he could exploit the weak points the drones had made. 

The drones were slumped in the hallways, inactive and immobile.

A few of the Olkari slipped into the upper levels under La Sai’s direction to disable the rest of the security, taking advantage of how much La Sai had managed to overhear and learn in his years as an attendant in the tower. They reconvened with Ryner and Pidge in the open space in the middle of the pillar. Shiro and Hunk had gotten down well ahead of the other two, and Keith suspected it had to do with a blown out window partway up on that side.

“-ntrol of the automated defenses shortly; it should serve until we can replace them with our own.” 

“So you’ll be okay if Zarkon sends people to try to retake the planet?” Pidge was leaning against the wall, cross-legged, her laptop in her lap. 

“We’ve survived this long,” Ryner commented briefly. 

“Does this mean we can sleep soon? We’ve been going pretty hard for most of the day now.” Hunk flopped down sitting against the wall himself. 

Shiro raised a hand in a tired wave as they came out of the doorway; Lance leaned against the ornamental tree in the middle, hands laced behind his head. “I’m with Hunk on that one.” 

Ryner was bringing up a larger screen, turning it to adjust what would be visible from it; she had it angled to leave Hunk and Pidge out of the frame, but Shiro would be visible in the background. 

“People of Olkarion. With the aid of the Paladins of Voltron, we have finally driven the Galra occupation from our world.” She gave a pause after that. “My name is Ryner, and I am the one who led those of us who fled to the forests in the efforts to reclaim our home. I am acting as Queen, as our King betrayed our people. If those of you further flung have heard stories of him giving designs for weapons to the Galra, living in luxury while his people slaved and suffered - those stories are all unfortunately true.” She waited another few beats, time for a far-flung reaction she couldn’t see and choosing words. “We have claimed control over the command tower and shut down their automated defenses they set upon us as they fled. I ask that any regional leaders contact me as soon as possible, to aid in organizing efforts to rebuild and recover - we do not know how much time we have to prepare, but it is likely that sooner or later, Zarkon’s empire will look our way again.” 

She glanced away briefly, toward Keith, closed her eyes for a moment, then continued. “The Galra commander’s retreat and evacuation was ill handled; there may be Galra civilians, children, and surrenders remaining behind. It is my _order_ that any Galra that is not an active threat to our people be detained _humanely_ and given the basic respect due a sapient being; we did not cast off the shackles of Zarkon’s brutality to forge our own. I will also be seeing to efforts to decide how to handle these stranded castoffs; if you do not have facilities to handle this, send a message and we will bring them here, to the capital.” 

Keith nodded in thanks; he was to the side somewhat, but behind the screen, well within Ryner’s line of sight but out of view of it. 

“Our people were once a part of a vast alliance that made every effort to bring peace, freedom, and compassion to the universe. It has been many decafeebs since that alliance was more than children’s tales and a broken dream - but Voltron has returned to the universe, with new Paladins who honor the old oaths. Zarkon has already begun his pursuit of them, trying to put an end to them; he fears them, as one of the few powers that may be able to challenge his stranglehold. They have already risked their lives to aid our people, and in return, we will be allied with them against the Empire. We will defend our people and our new freedom, and we will pursue every chance to restore the dream that we were once a part of.”

She dismissed the screen, stepping back with a long, tired exhale. 

“And now we get to clean up a history’s worth of mess,”, the Olkari watching the door said with calm resignation.

“We’ve rebuilt cities before, we’ll do it again,” Ryner answered simply.

Lance yawned and shifted, folding his arms. “What about that soldier we sent down? Where’s he?”

The Olkari guarding the door motioned to another door, near where Pidge was sitting. “We locked him in a waiting room here. First time I’ve seen a Galra terrified of us.” There was smug pride, no matter how level and official he was trying to be. 

“We should move to one of the indoor rooms ourselves, at least until you’re all ready to leave.” Ryner waved to them to follow, and led down one of the hallways to some kind of sitting room; there were screens around it that suggested it to be a somewhat less formal meeting room, the walls showing the outside with no seams, a projection through replacing windows that might be a vulnerability. There was smoke rising from several parts of the city, but the earlier chaos was settling down finally, Olkari tentatively picking through the streets. Most of them found places on the cushioned, broad chairs; Ryner stood in the middle of the room, watching the cityscape, and Keith stayed by the door. 

Keith cleared his throat once they were all inside; Ryner nodded. “I doubt that child will be the only one we find, although I hope it is only few.”

“You think the Commander wasn’t prioritizing families?” Hunk looked unsettled by it even if he seemed to suspect the same.

“From La Sai’s report, he left it to his people to keep track of civilians and family members, with a deadline on launches, and did not inform most of the rank and file military of the evacuation until the last minute - likely to avoid us realizing he planned to turn on the planet as a whole.” She gave the ‘window’ a bitter frown. “I’m sure there are some that were simply unable to make it to the launch in the chaos, like the prisoner Lance sent us, or who did not get word in time, at the least.” 

“And if the military were responsible for verifying their own family was on board, then any orphans of casualties wouldn’t have even known there was an evacuation.” Keith leaned on the doorframe; unless Ryner’s efforts to sort out the Galra left behind found someone related, the odds for the kid they’d found weren’t good. 

“We have access to the personnel records, which should have bioscan records of staff and family members. I can bring it up from this room, and hopefully found out who your rescue belonged to.” She finally looked away, turning to Keith.

He nodded, and walked out to go back to the lion. 

The particle barrier went down when he was still a dozen yards away, Red’s eyes suddenly glowing with a rumbling purr. The lion didn’t open her jaws until he was close, letting him walk in before closing the entrance again. He could almost feel Red trying not to laugh, and that worried him. 

He opened the door to the central chamber to chaos and muffled voices from a recording.

About a third of the storage containers were open, contents scattered around the compartment. Ralar was in the middle of the room with a light panel brought up from a console on the wall, deep in some directory of old videos and news recordings; the screen and voices were enough to briefly draw Keith’s attention and focus away from the state of the room.

It was the interior of some Altaean ship, one of the large storage areas attached to a hangar bay turned into a makeshift shelter; a handful of Altaeans and a few Galra in something that was a distant echo of familiar military armor were busy in the background, moving among more civilian-clothed Galra who mostly seemed dazed and shaken. Some were intact and looked physically fine, but there were definitely some injuries. There was an Altaean woman in dress that he recognized as similar in style to Allura’s in the center-front of the recording, and Zarkon, yellow-eyed and younger. Their attention was on an off-frame ship that could be heard landing in the hangar, Zarkon watching it with an expression of subdued bewildered awe, while the Altaean was proudly smug, a smile playing across her face. 

Zarkon’s moment of confusion was quickly pulled into control, and whoever was recording turned it so that the small Altaean ship that had just landed was visible, a figure in light armor helping a more ragged and definitely battered Galra off the ship without signs of more than mild hindrance from helping the much larger Galra walk; there were a few others following behind.

It was Alfor, younger and setting foot on the larger deck with relieved determination. 

“I had not expected the Altaean King himself to go after the most dangerous recovery.” Zarkon walked forward, past Alfor to the entrance of the ship to lend his own arm to some of the ragged survivors. 

“Well, their small ship was obviously too damaged to make it out before the star’s gravity had too much hold, but mine could make it in and out, and I wasn’t about to order someone to take that chance unless I was certain they could make it.” Alfor passed off the Galra he’d been helping carry to someone that was in some kind of uniform; he’d found one like it around the infirmary on the Castle. The Altaean medic stumbled, caught off guard by the greater weight at first, and did not seem to have as easy a time as Alfor did. 

“I had been wondering how you had managed to earn Kavet’s respect.” Zarkon’s voice off-frame was bemused.

“’Why were we born with this power, if not to use it for the good of all’.” Alfor recited it in a tone that had to make it some kind of quote, then smiled back over his shoulder.

He shifted in the doorway, and one of Ralar’s ears twitched; in a moment, the child was on top of a couple of the stacked containers against the wall, fur puffed with a pitchy growl as the screen blinked out. Recognition followed a second or two later, and they relaxed, shifting to sit on the edge of the container and doing an amazing job of acting as though everything were normal and nothing had happened. 

He recognized Altaean clothing at this point thanks to the stray Altaen clothes that they’d been finding in various closets and storage containers in the castle, and there was random Altaean clothing scattered all over the inside of the compartment, along with a few inactive tools and instruments he didn’t recognize, a couple of smaller boxes and containers that hadn’t opened, and a messy spread that took him a minute to resolve it as a half-dismantled tent that’d had a failed and confused attempt at putting it together. 

More alarming was a handful of the pouches he recognized from the castle and Coran tossing water and a few other fluids he still couldn’t quite identify at him, along with a bunch of other wrappers, some closed, and that Ralar had a half-eaten pressed bar of some kind hanging out of their mouth. 

He tapped his helmet to bring up the radio, trying not to sound like he was panicking. “Coran, I have a few _really_ urgent questions.”

“Yes? What’s wrong?” Coran was still re-orienting from what was apparently a relaxed and lively conversation to Keith’s sense of alarm. 

“There were a bunch of storage containers in the lion. How well preserved would anything inside them be?” He was trying not to think too hard about it until Coran answered, because thinking too hard about how edible something ten thousand years old would be was not good for his sanity that moment.

“Well, while the lions were dormant, anything within would be in a sort of temporal stasis, so… probably very?”

Which at least bumped down the effective time the food and drink had been abandoned down from ten thousand years to … several months, plus however long it’d been since they were stowed in the lion before that. Red didn’t seem to think it was a big deal and was amused at his suppressed near-panic; the lion apparently could keep the storage panels shut if she wanted to, and this had happened early enough to be unsure how long it would take.

Ralar was looking down at the food bar quizzically, having moved it from mouth to hands. 

“So how long would whatever you guys used for travel rations last in storage?”

“Oh, those packages can keep things from going bad for a year or two.” Coran paused. “Although it might not agree well with a Galra; they’re carnivores, after all, and how tolerant they are of plant fibers and starches varies.” 

It apparently wasn’t that hard to guess why he was asking.

“How bad could that be?” He had some clue, remembering some of his own incidents of throwing up and general misery when he was younger. 

“Not _dangerous_ for a single incident, but certainly not pleasant; stomach cramps, vomiting, illness, rather miserable for a few hours.” 

So it was probably perfectly edible…

Just chancy at best for a pureblooded Galra.

“Alright, I’ll…talk to Ryner about it. Thanks.” He cut the call and hit his visor with his hand in an attempt at rubbing his face. Ralar’s quizzical expression had turned more speculatively suspicious of the food bar.

He walked across the chamber, trying to ignore the mess beyond stepping around things; he’d worry about putting it all back later. 

“Okay, the fighting’s over, and Ryner wants to see if we can find your family.” He stopped in front of the containers. “Also that’s Altaean food. It might make you _really_ sick pretty soon.” 

Ralar’s nose wrinkled, tongue out. “It is gross, but I was _really_ hungry…” 

Red got a few choice bits shoved her way that included frustration and _I can’t believe you thought that was a good idea, just because a kid asks if you have food doesn’t mean -_ , trailing off on exactly what he was potentially dealing with now. There was a little acknowledgment of maybe having not thought it entirely through, but not nearly enough regret and no repentance; it wouldn’t be more than passing discomfort at worst.

Apparently between the lions there was some knowledge of what eating Altaean food was like for Galra. He was almost tempted to file it under ‘not asking’, but there was something compelling and ‘earmark for later’ worthy about what was probably a story of Zarkon doing something idiotic. _You are the WORST babysitter._

He held his arms up open, trying to coax them down; this proved to be not entirely thought through, and when Ralar hopped down, he was abruptly reminded that the child was almost as big as Pidge, and that they’d been in a bit of a marathon since they landed. He did manage to get Ralar to the ground without any more mishap than a half-stumble back.

He got to the door; Ralar almost tripped over some kind of light shirt, then stopped, staring at it after pulling it off their foot, suddenly gone quiet and still.

Keith turned, walked the few steps back, and knelt down in a crouch. “What’s wrong?”

The child was looking away, fingers running over the thin fabric. “Where did those videos come from?”

The others would have to wait a minute, as long as the Altaean food didn’t catch up too quickly. He settled cross-legged on the ground. “The lions were hidden in stasis for ten thousand years. It’s probably stuff that was recorded by the last Paladins and their families and people.” 

“…Was that really Emperor Zarkon?” They glanced up, barely.

He nodded. “Yeah. A long time ago, he used to be a close friend of King Alfor’s. He was one of the old Paladins.” The entire world the kid had lived in was falling apart; the best he could do to help was be as honest as he could. He knew how much avoiding or lying about anything would only hurt in the long run.

“We were taught that the Altaeans had been our enemy…that they’d used our people and let their enemies try to destroy us, until Zarkon fought back…” Ralar sank down sitting, the loose Altaean cloth draped over their lap. “What happened?”

He let out a long breath. “I don’t know all of it. Something awful happened, and Zarkon blamed everyone else. He turned on them, and that’s when the Empire started.” 

Ralar leaned back, staring at him sideways, suspiciously. “’Something awful’.” 

He made a few weak, confused gestures. “Well - look, what I know I’ve gotten from Red, and she doesn’t really use words.”

“The lion?” That distracted the child, who shrank, looking up and around at the room. “…Like the recordings?”

Keith shook his head. “They’re living things, and we’re tied to them. It’s all ideas and concepts and sometimes images or bits of some memory from the previous Paladins, though, and we’re… still new at it enough that it’s just fragments. I know it was pretty bad though.” Even that felt like an understatement. “Allura and Coran probably know, but…”

He trailed off, and Ralar’s attention turned back to him. 

“…King Alfor put them into cryosleep in the middle of it; we woke them up. They went from gunfire and people they cared about killing each other, to finding out their people were extinct and everything they’d known was destroyed. I don’t really want to push that hard if they’re not ready to talk about it yet.” After what happened with Zarkon, he did trust Allura to at least give some clue if there was something else that was a threat they knew about, and that was about all he really needed. The history lessons could wait. “There’s some kind of old guilt in the memories - like some mistake went worse than anyone expected or something. Zarkon was hurt pretty badly out of it, he just…never healed and turned into someone else after a while.”

The child’s ears twitched down, and they nodded, going quiet again, starting a pattern of almost worrying at the delicate cloth in their hands with claws, then stopping when it looked like it might get damaged. 

“…So you’re tied to the lions…and the lions are tied together.” They were still fidgeting with the cloth.

“Yeah?” 

“Does that mean you’re all tied together too?”

He opened his mouth, and it hung open for a moment while he tapped the air, then he shifted, folding his hands on his ankles with his legs still folded in. “…Sort of? It’s not - really loud usually when we’re not in the lions? We get each other’s dreams sometimes.” Ralar’s focused expression made him thing it was going somewhere, and he was only just starting to guess where.

“And Zarkon?”

He had mentioned Zarkon having been a paladin before. He grimaced. “…Yeah.”

Ralar’s jaw shifted, thinking, and they were staring at him oddly. “So what’s he like now?” 

It took him a moment of trying to figure out how to not think too hard about it and still talk about it; it was all too easy to hear Zarkon’s voice in his head and feel that otherworldly chill again. “…He’s like a black hole. You can’t even tell anymore there was some kind of light there once, it just devours anything going near it. I think he’s still hurt and afraid somewhere under it all, but he’s put so many layers of anger and paranoid hatred on top of it that you couldn’t get close without getting ripped to pieces.” 

Ralar turned to look back, through the space the screen had been occupying. “How does that even happen?”

He didn’t know how much the kid had seen, but it had definitely been enough to get a glimpse of who Zarkon had been once. 

He took a deep breath, closing his eyes. “Sometimes when you’re hurt enough, you get angry because it shouldn’t have happened, and afraid it might happen again - and it’s bad enough that it’s all you can really see at the time, especially if it came from someone or something you thought you could trust. Everything starts looking like it’s just another thing out to hurt you, especially if it’s anything or anyone that’s trying to get you to calm down… because calming down means letting your guard down. So you’re just left with either avoiding things or lashing out, to hurt them first. After a while you’ve hurt a lot of people, and the ones that might’ve been friends or wanted to help are angry and upset that you hurt them… but it just feels like it ‘proves’ that they’d always been out to get you and you were right to hurt them. Once that starts happening, it just keeps getting worse and it’s hard to stop doing it.” 

He shifted, leaning back a little. “Red told me that’s what happened to Zarkon; he was hurt bad enough that he was afraid to trust anyone, then he started lashing out, to get back at them and ‘make sure’ he couldn’t be hurt again. I think at first he _was_ telling himself he was doing the best thing for his people, too, so he wouldn’t have to admit to himself that he was afraid… then he got so far down that hole that even the other Galra started being something to destroy if he couldn’t control them.” 

Ralar had shrunk, curling in, and there were definitely pinholes in the shirt.

He sighed; it was a lot to unload on a kid that had probably been discouraged from thinking things through that deeply before, but also something where he knew they were going to have to deal with it, and talking to them would help them more than just crossing fingers and pretending they _couldn’t_ understand it. “Look, I’ve been in that hole myself. I’d be a lot deeper in it and probably wouldn’t be here right now if Shiro hadn’t caught me when he did - back before the arenas. It’s not easy to dig out of, because you can’t get things to heal without risking getting hurt sometimes, but it’s an awful, ugly place to stay in that’s made of nothing but hurt after a while.” 

Ralar nodded, stopping and frowning at one of the clawholes that had gotten a little wider, trying to smooth the fabric as if it’d make it go away. 

He reached over, putting a hand on the kid’s shoulder; they started at the nudge with a faint growl and a few teeth showing, then wilted. 

“It’s okay. I think the previous Paladin would be okay with a few holes in their things for something like this.” The growl turned into another quiet, high rusted noise. He stood up, holding a hand out to them. 

They took his hand, and were quiet on the way to the control tower, eyes on the ground or the city or anywhere else but not really looking up. They did shrink closer once they got into the tower, trying to keep him between them and the Olkari who was on watch at the door.

The Olkari was barely paying attention; with Black right there looming over the door and the drones shut down, it was unlikely there’d be any trouble there. There were a number of others in the tower, on various errands, the efforts of cleaning up and reclaiming already ongoing. He heard Coran’s voice from a high window, some distant conversation with other Olkari that seemed to be a mix of serious planning and dumb jokes. 

When he got into the waiting room, Hunk was dozing on the chair, Lance had sprawled out across one longer bench, and Pidge was busy with something on her laptop; a door to some other office was open on the other side of the room. Pidge pointed at the open door when he walked in, and he followed that quietly.

Ryner, Shiro, and Allura were around a table that had a three dimensional display of the planet, various light points, lines, and symbols crossing it. They all looked up when he entered.

Shiro took a couple large steps back to the wall-window, leaning against it with his arms folded and looking away, trying to stay out of the way as much as he could. Allura looked up, then looked away, quietly sad and distant; she stepped back as well, to give space on that side of the table. 

Ryner walked around the table, calling up two panels from the table on the side, pulling one down to be closer to Ralar’s eye level. She half-knelt.

“Here. If you can put your hand on this, then I can find you in the computer, and see if we can find any family.” 

Ralar nodded, not quite looking at Ryner, and put a hand on the panel; Ryner stood to see the other one. 

Ryner’s frown was faint and easily missed; there was little disturbance in her calm composure when she knelt back down to Ralar. “Would you mind staying with Lance for a moment in the other room?” 

The child glanced up at her only briefly, to back up and wedge behind Keith, tugging his arm with.

He twisted around a little to look down. “It’ll just be for a minute here. We just need to figure something out.” 

The rusty noise had started again, mixed with a faint growl, but Ralar went with when he moved to walk back out to the other room. Lance had been dozing himself, but woke up with a quiet mumble when he realized Keith was standing over him. He sat up, straightening his hair with one hand, then noticed Ralar clinging to Keith’s arm.

“I have to talk to Ryner for a minute and need you to watch Ralar.” 

Lance had a flicker of a wince, then leaned around him to where the child was hiding. “Hey. It’ll be okay - he’ll be right back, and trust me, he’d stab anybody who even suggested anything bad happening to you.” Lance motioned over, and after a long minute and a change in the pitch of the growl-whine, Ralar dove for the couch-bench, curling into a ball against the back next to Lance. Lance rested a hand on the child’s shoulder, leaning back on the couch. “Don’t worry, I’ve got this - two younger brothers and five cousins.” 

Keith knew better than to point out that his brothers and cousins were all probably NOT terrified orphans or abandonment cases with sharp teeth and claws, more because he knew that razzing Lance right now would just read to Ralar as not having confidence in Lance, and that’d make it worse.

He’d just have to hope Lance’s experience with stable, secure kids could translate well enough to traumatized ones for a few minutes. 

The door closed behind him in the office; Allura was beside Ryner, looking over the panel, and next to the model of the planet was another one of the city and the surrounding area. 

Ryner waited until he was beside the table to speak.

“Her only listed caretaker is her mother. She was assigned to the teams that would sweep through the forests just outside the city.” 

Keith winced; that meant decent likelihood of dying in the fighting.

Ryner tapped the map where there were a few moving lines. “Remember that we were timing our movements for in between sweeps? The evacuation and our assault interrupted the computer’s personnel tracking, and the command tower didn’t have access to the rosters on any ships leaving. Her mother’s team was the one returning. Depending on timing, she could have been among the first lines we met outside the city, drug into an evacuation when the area listed as where they were living was cut off by the fighting, or caught in crossfire somewhere.”

“So she might be alive?” He wasn’t sure if he should hope for that or not; there was no telling how well a Galra soldier would take to what had gone on with the kid, and he didn’t trust them to not turn on their own. Regimes like that kept power by encouraging their people to turn on their own families if there were signs of dissent, or to work harder to pressure them.

“More likely if she evacuated than if she remained planetside - there weren’t many military left behind, and most of those few have been doing everything they can to go down fighting.” Ryner sighed. “If she didn’t make it to the evacuation, and if she survived the fighting and surrendered, it could be a few days before we hear of it, but it’s more likely that Ralar is either an orphan or may as well have been abandoned.” 

He nodded soberly.

“We’ve received word of a few other children in similar situations,” Allura added. “We were discussing arrangements to bring them here, among the other plans and arrangements; under the circumstances, there won’t be many places safe for them.”

Ryner nodded to that. “We can’t keep them with any of our own children, after the last ten thousand years; the odds of violence and abuse from one side or the other, or both, are almost unavoidable. I would like to believe that most of my people would not take out their frustrations on children, but until we have more stability, I would prefer they be where I can ensure there is oversight from people I trust.” 

Ten thousand years of hatreds wouldn’t go away easily, and he was all too familiar with how vehemently children would follow cues from their parents even if the parents tried to keep them out of public view. 

He sighed, and looked back at the door distantly; Shiro spoke up.

“You know we can’t take her on the Castle - not with Zarkon breathing down our necks so closely.” Shiro was getting restless, tense; Keith knew the reflex he never really quieted, to always be on edge for some kind of attack, but in this case, it was stronger for being valid. Zarkon really was that intent on coming after them, and every day they spent on repairs and idle was another day for him to repair his command center and redirect his fleet or create another Robeast to send in pursuit. With the evacuation, there would be reports.

Allura closed her eyes, leaning on the table. “Zarkon, constant battles, and there being so few of us. It’s no place for a child.” 

“Yeah. I know.” Even on quieter days, they had too much going on with repairs and upkeep; it was a large ship and there wouldn’t be much supervision, nevermind how often they were under fire. If anyone Zarkon sent after them managed to get on ship again, he doubted they’d hesitate to use a child as a hostage and bargaining chip at best, if not kill or torture them for bait, spite, or just pure brainwashed ‘racial purity’ dogmas. 

“We need to clean up and reorganize to bring the cities back into the rest of our people, but we have plans.” Ryner dismissed the map of the city itself. “We’ve been working on plans, variations of plans, and contingencies for ten thousand years.” 

“And we shouldn’t stay much longer - we don’t want to bring Zarkon to your doorstep.” Shiro was watching out the window, absently flexing the prosthetic hand. 

“Hopefully we can return sooner rather than later, and with more time and less dire circumstances.” Allura was pensive, and Keith had to wonder if she’d been to Olkarion herself before everything fell apart. 

They didn’t have much time, and he still had a child to explain things to and hand over.

“Alright. I’ll go talk to Ralar.” Keith took a deep breath and turned on one heel; it was a sudden and jarring shift from the massive scale of the interstellar war, to a sudden stomach-lurch and trying not to think about how many times he’d been the kid told to wait outside, usually right before getting to hear that a placement was terminated. He couldn’t argue with it, either; this wasn’t something where there really was a choice, and he was pretty sure Ralar would’ve been bargaining and in and out of panic hearing that go over her head. 

It wasn’t a pleasant role reversal.

He didn’t realize Shiro had stepped away from the wall until Shiro’s good hand was on his arm.

“Keith - you don’t have to do this. I know what this is for you. Ryner-”

“No. That’s _why_ I have to do it.” He pulled away, walking out the door before Shiro could say anything else. He _didn’t_ want to be the one to do this, but he wanted someone who didn’t know what it was like from the kid’s side to do it even less.

Lance had managed to get Ralar out of the ball hiding in the couch and sitting next to him; whatever conversation had been going on stopped when the door opened. They both looked up, and it was apparently obvious enough in his own tension and expression that the child wadded back up against Lance, wedged half behind him with another thin rusty-hinge whine.

Keith walked over, sitting down on the other side of the kid, giving Lance a moment to put an arm around her; Lance’s mouth was open, but for once even he couldn’t find something to say.

Keith went through a few almost starts; he heard Pidge’s keyboard go quiet, but didn’t look over to see if Pidge was watching. 

“…They don’t know for sure, but… your mother was probably either in the fighting somewhere or pulled into one of the evacuation ships.” He folded his hands in his lap. “Ryner’s going to keep checking, just in case. It’s not likely, but if she is alive and on-planet, they’ll know in a few days.” 

Ralar wasn’t looking at him, wedged into the couch and Lance’s armor.

“We…can’t stay that long, either. We’re still being hunted, and we don’t want to turn this place into a warzone again if we can help it. I don’t want to bring another battle like that or worse here.” 

There wasn’t an answer besides the rusted noise, but he saw a few claws come out, trying to dig into Lance’s armor. Lance shifted to curl around the child, rubbing her back with one hand. “We’ll be back as soon as we can, okay? We’re not just going to leave you here and forget about you.” 

Keith almost winced; he knew Lance was trying, but he also knew where the trap was there. 

“It’ll be-”

Keith hissed through his teeth at Lance, glaring. No matter how well intentioned, hearing ‘it’ll be okay’ constantly when things obviously _weren’t_ would only teach her that they were lying to her. Lance looked up, there was a beat where he knew Lance was about to argue, then Lance glanced down at the kid, and went sullenly quiet, glowering at him while she still had her face buried. 

“It might be a while before we can make it back. We need to be sure we aren’t just going to make things worse, and I don’t know how long that’ll be, but we’ll do everything we can to protect this place and you, even if we’re not here, okay?” He tried to put a hand on her shoulder, but it ended up an awkward wedge around Lance’s arm. “Ryner won’t let anyone hurt you; you can trust her.” 

He went quiet; at that point there wasn’t much but to let her have what was apparently the Galra equivalent of a sobbing fit and wait for it to burn itself out. The door opened after a few more minutes, Shiro the first one out; there was a self-conscious pause where Shiro was half a step into hurrying over, then just sidestepped over to sit on the other side of Hunk, watching sideways and waiting. Allura had her own uncertain pause, hand raised and mouth open, then looked away with a sad headshake, finding a place by the wall.

Ryner walked over, kneeling neatly in front of them to wait. 

The movement was noticed with a flinch, but after a few seconds passed with nothing happening, Ralar twisted around to peer under Lance’s arm.

 

“Sorry to startle you.” Ryner rested one hand on the edge of the couch, voice gentle. “I wish we all had better news for you.” 

Ralar’s ear ticked and she shrank back around and behind the two Paladins, eyes narrowing suspiciously.

“I know you don’t have much reason right now to trust any of my people. I wish that I could simply return you to your mother and send you on your way, but even if we do find her alive, we couldn’t send you to the Empire.”

“Why not?”

“Because the way they run things right now, they’d probably execute your mother as a traitor for accepting help from the enemy, and we don’t know what they’d do with you after that,” Keith said flatly, before anyone else could come up with a nicer-sounding but false answer; he looked down to her, with a very small nod back out of the building. 

Ralar’s ears lowered, but she nodded. Lance was giving him an odd and uncomfortable look; Ryner looked away for a moment, not arguing.

“I know this isn’t what you were taught, but our people were once allies, when I was a child. I don’t know if it can ever be the way it was, but I at least would rather not forget it.” She held her hand up at the edge of the couch, not reaching any closer. “You have my word that I won’t allow anyone to harm you here. Will you let us help you?” 

There was a long, tense wait with periodic faint growls; Ralar didn’t want to come out of hiding behind them, but eventually just looked up at Keith.

He nodded toward Ryner. “You can trust her. It’ll be better for you here than it’d be on the Castle.”

There was a rusted-hinge whine, then Ralar slid out from behind them, resting a hand on Ryner’s, still tense. 

Ryner smiled, resting her other hand over Ralar’s.

It took a few minutes to fully coax the child out enough for Lance and Keith to stand up, but after that, it didn’t take long for Ryner to become a Stable Thing to hide behind. Keith suspected it wouldn’t really be Ralar being _comfortable_ with Ryner for a while yet, but it was some kind of a start, and Ryner at least seemed like she had an idea of how to Not Fuck It Up. With what she’d been running for who knew how long, Keith did trust her to have people that would be able to take over sometimes, too. 

As soon as they were out the door, Shiro was back on edge, all but physically watching the skies as if he expected a battlecruiser or robeast to appear any moment. 

They returned to the lions, the Castle having been moved nearby at some point while he’d been in Red earlier. 

For once, he wasn’t the first one off the ground, staring at the mess in the central compartment.

“We’ll come back, once we have some breathing room and a plan. We’ll probably need the Olkari’s help at some point anyway.” Shiro’s voice was loud and clear over the radio, and he could feel the mess of worry - not as loud as being in the same lion, but still noticeable. It seemed like Shiro wasn’t sure what to worry about more, Keith after dealing with that or Zarkon showing up. 

“It’s not that. It’s -” Did he want to say that some of the belongings of the previous Paladin were spread out over the inner chamber. “Look, the inner chamber’s a bit of a mess right now.” He closed his eyes with a plea to Red, who was amused and more than confident in her ability to keep localized gravity and inertial damping on that room to avoid turning it into any more of a wreck. “I’ll deal with it when we’re on the Castle.”

He turned back to the cockpit; he was looking forward to a chance to rest and sleep.


	23. Are you with me now - find the places that scare you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith and Lance have another brief bit of clashing in the dark elevator while finding the emergency exit, both tired and grouchy enough to lose a few filters, and Keith is incredibly lucky for how much Lance will take in stride and not think about.
> 
> And the entire confrontation with Zarkon over the storm is its own ordeal, with all of them forced to pull together closer to help fight off his attempt at taking over the Black Lion.

Allura was getting sneakier about her idea of ‘team building exercises’. 

That realization was almost more frustrating than being suddenly locked in a small, dark space with Lance. There was no way it was a coincidence that she’d managed to talk both of them into heading to the pool at about the same time, and he was dead certain the power going out in the lift was absolutely not an accident. 

The worst part was that he knew why she’d done it and that she wasn’t wrong; in fact, Red was firmly on her side, and practically purring with pride that Allura had managed to set them up in a situation where they had no options _but_ to cooperate.

“They have to know we’re here, right?”

Lance was apparently either not quite paranoid enough or just in denial that Allura would do this to them intentionally. Keith considered reminding him that she’d opened fire on them from the Castle before for similar reasons, but Red was very loudly waiting for him to accept the point of why they were stuck there.

“Probably.”

There was a tapping sound; his eyes were adjusting enough to make out the vague shape of Lance fumbling blind to get the control panel of the lift to respond to get a comm call out. It was completely dead; even the emergency lighting in the lift wasn’t coming on. It wasn’t quite total darkness, but it was close to it, only faint impressions of light from some of the label marks beside the control panel. 

“You didn’t bring anything you could call out with, did you?”

“No.” Sullen as the one word was, Keith was grouchier with Allura for orchestrating this and himself for falling for it than with Lance’s weak attempt at hope. The storage compartments with clothing and other basic linens were all near their rooms, and it had been easier to just change there and not lug other clothes and items down to the pool, an idea they’d both had. 

There was a few minutes of silence; Keith was tired and took issue with Allura’s timing, even if he knew they’d just had an exhaustion-aggravated boil over on minor conflicts that was bad enough to put everyone at risk. They didn’t know when Zarkon might find them again, which both meant they couldn’t afford getting stuck in an elevator and left there, and - as Red wasn’t letting him forget - that they couldn’t afford to be fighting each other when he caught back up.

“…So what was that back there?”

Lance’s tone set his nerves on edge. “What was what?”

“That whole - thing with the kid. Cutting me off and everything.”

“You didn’t know what you were doing.” His voice had dropped quieter, partly dampened with his renewed need to put effort into not growling. 

“Like Hell I didn’t! That was a scared kid, she needed someplace she could feel saf-”

“She needed to know she could _trust_ us and that wouldn’t help!”, Keith snapped, only stifling an audibly inhuman snarl under it by a minor miracle. He’d turned, pulling up as tall as he could; Lance tensed at the sound of movement, but didn’t react until Keith was looming close at him, suddenly pulling back with a startle and running his back into the lift wall. 

Even if Lance was flattened against the wall, it didn’t stop him from trying to bristle right back. “You _don’t_ always know everything! I’ve spent my entire life around kids-”

“Around kids with families and homes to go back to! Not hurt kids who’ve had everything ripped out from under them!”

“And how do you know any better than I do?! You were living in a shack when you weren’t at the Garrison!”

“Because I _was_ that kid!” The teeth he was showing should’ve been sharp, there should have been claws curving off his fingers, his ears were all wrong, it shouldn’t be that hard to see in the dim light. “You want to know what I learned from people always telling me it was okay when it obviously wasn’t?” He was leaning in closer, to where Lance had to be able to see at least shapes even with nearly no light. “I learned that _anybody_ making sympathetic noises or acting like they cared was _lying_ to me!”

Lance froze, falling quiet. Keith couldn’t make out much of his expression, even that close, but he was staying still and not trying to continue the argument. 

Keith stayed where he was a couple more beats, not willing to turn his back at first, then stepped back. They were still stuck in an elevator, Lance wasn’t arguing with him, and he needed something to do with the new burst of restless energy. He could sort of trace parts of the wall, the light from whatever mechanisms were under the paneling faint and barely visible but there. 

When there was the sound of him scrabbling his hands over the paneling, feeling for access panels or emergency exit catches, Lance let out a long breath and sank back against the wall. He paused, studying the lines he could make out, and made a guess; the ceiling was higher than he’d ever paid attention to, a few feet out of his reach, and the elevator was too wide to wedge between walls. 

“I think there’s an emergency exit.” 

“I’d hope there is.” There was a beat. “…Wait, you can see in this?” 

“Not really,” Keith admitted, trying to feel along the wall for handholds. If Zarkon was the old Black Paladin, then there’d probably been Galra on the crew when the Castle was built, which was probably why the ceilings were so high everywhere. There were also Altaeans and probably others on the crew, too, so it wouldn’t make sense to make an emergency exit only a part of the crew could reach. “Just some of the mechanisms inside the walls glowing a little.” 

He was too preoccupied trying to find patterns in the faint luminescence that might be clues to think too hard about it, feeling along the walls for anything that might give or have a catch. Lance had turned, also fumbling at the wall with far less direction. “Man, good luck with that, because I can’t see shit.” 

He paused, and suddenly wished he could see well enough to check for claws or anything else, some old internal reflex half-bracing to be told he was imagining things and there weren’t any lights in the wall. It never came; there was only the sound of Lance fumbling at the metal.

It did seem like there was a pattern, but if there was any further writing that might give a clue how to activate the emergency exit, it was something he couldn’t see, either, and speculating about Altaean and Galra visual ranges wouldn’t do them any good getting out. 

There was a click off to his left, and the uneven, faint sound of mechanical parts moving, stopping with a bit more noise every so often as Lance fumbled with it. “There’s a panel or something over here!” Keith hurried over, unable to see much more than vague shapes over Lance’s shoulder, but if he was reading what he could manage right then the panel was rotating out with -

“HAH! There’s a ladder!” Lance was up it almost as soon as he said it, apparently managing to hook his feet into it at the top enough to start scrabbling at the ceiling to find the emergency exit catch.

That part of the ceiling had an area that was off-pattern from what Keith could see, a large, rounded-edged square space over where Lance was fumbling. “Left - to your left, there’s some kind of edge, the latch is probably either on the edges or in the middle - not that far left - Try down - your other down, toward the wall!”

Lance cut off any further directions with a strangled noise of frustration, sliding down the ladder and blindly pawing his upper arm to shove at it. “Fine, if you can see, you do it!” 

He almost growled going up the ladder, but kept it to a more human-sounding noise. Even seeing some outlines, it still took fumbling, and the catch turned out to be in the middle of the panel; when it clicked, that section of the ceiling popped upward with a sudden burst of light from the shaft, lifting out of the way easily on a hinge made to slide it to the side.

Keith clambered onto the top of the elevator, blinking in the bright light and straightening the towel over his shoulders. Lance was hurrying up to the top himself, right behind him. The shaft still had power, it was only the elevator itself that had shut off.

Allura had _definitely_ set them up. 

“So.” Lance was studying the walls, eyes narrowed with a frown. “You see anything weird about the walls out here?”

If there was anything, it was getting mostly washed out in the harsh white light. “Not a thing.”

“Damnit.” 

Getting out of the elevator was apparently the easy part. 

*****************************************************************

Every reprieve from Zarkon's pursuit predator game was entirely too short-lived. Keith was bitterly aware of the comparisons; Galra seemed to be built a little more for ambush and fast chases, Keith's instincts when he'd been out hunting and ran out of bullets or other makeshift weapons besides the knife had been a much shorter and more violent ambush than his body was built for. He'd probably only ever succeeded at it on tenacity and desperation alone. Letting prey bolt and then just tracking it to find it every time it tried to hide until it was too exhausted to keep running was the tactic humans had been so successful with, and Zarkon was turning it around on them. 

The command ship was over the storm they’d thought would hide them. They were within the outer edges of Zarkon’s range while they were in it, and the storm that interfered with other sensors didn’t seem to be hindering him any, the black hole waiting just on the edge of awareness. 

He wasn’t going to strike until they were too close to just use momentum and the storm to get out of his reach. It was almost more unnerving than if he’d been striking at them, knowing that he was waiting and biding his time like a cat outside a mousehole. 

Leading the fighters away from the castle left them with with no real way out of the storm besides coming up right beside the behemoth command ship; the storm was more dense below them, the debris thicker, whipping around more violently, while going straight out the side found larger pieces and interference patterns bad enough to grate across the lions' senses and feed back through them as uncomfortable mental white noise.

He’d caught them off guard before, forcing the lions apart before they had time to get any sense of what was going on. This time they were all bracing for it, Paladins and lions alike intent on holding together, pulling the ties closer as they cleared the storm easily within his reach.

It was still like setting a shield wall against a tidal wave, Zarkon both putting pressure on all of them and finding every little crack and space he could to wind tendrils and and start pushing, a black hole that’d learned to move like a flood. Voltron itself locked up, the tethers linking them to each other getting strained and stressed, desperation and near-panic bleeding multiple directions while Shiro was almost clawing into everyone else to keep them together; Zarkon was far older and more powerful, more experienced with the way the bonds between the lions and the paladins worked, and focusing on the lines around Shiro and Shiro himself, putting pressure on the center to separate them all at once. 

He'd once functioned as nearly one entity with the Black Lion, and through it, he had influence over all of them while Voltron was one entity.

A thin little mad idea occurred to Keith, the memory of the fracture lines when Zarkon had broken down and changed, the _familiarity_ of some of it; trying to weaponize his own pent up anger like before wouldn’t help distract Zarkon or keep him from breaking up the relay, but maybe gathering up something else and using it to strike back would work. It made it harder to focus on the others and holding Voltron together when he was hastily trying to lash his own, fresher fear of being hurt, fear of being taken advantage of, and bits of bleeding broken trust into the memory of a structure-pattern that wasn’t his - 

There was a sudden solidity to the other presences; it was impossible to tell Hunk and Lance from Yellow and Blue, and barely possible to tell them from each other for how well their protective, possessive anger blended together - sometimes faster and sharper-edged, sometimes with heavier solid force, _You aren’t hurting anyone while we’re here **you don’t touch our people**_ -

It almost threw off Keith’s focus on what he was working on, the combined flood and landslide fully intent on pulling him along with and leaving no-one behind.

Pidge and Green weren’t aimed at Zarkon exactly, something living and growing thrown out between them to pull them all together and damn anything that got between them, she wasn’t losing any more family or being separated from anyone else she cared about. 

If he didn’t strike he was going to lose even being able to hang onto all the old hurts of his own; Red knew what he was trying to do and was with him when he lashed back, adding another echo of betrayed hurt, grief, and rage to it; there were bits from some of the other lions passed along, death rattles and shock, hurt and stunned disbelief - _Let us help you, please stop pulling away you won’t find them there’s nothing here for you if it means I die then no more what happened to you listen to yourself I won’t let you destroy everything we worked for I’m the one you want -_

Keith and Red snarled behind it, now throwing their weight in with the others, more than willing to rip into Zarkon if he so much as looked at the others, he’d done _enough_ to Shiro alone as it was, and wasn't going to get the chance with anyone else there.

And then a very loud growl, like an alligator but pitched all wrong and with more of a rumbling snarl to it, echoed in his head.

Ten thousand years was long enough for old injuries to turn into hardened, stiffened scar tissue, no longer tender wounds and fractures that could be reopened so easily. Zarkon was not going to pull claws out of Shiro, but there was a promise that he and the others would suffer for the attempt on principle alone, and Zarkon’s assault shifted, putting more of his power into aiming for weak points in the bulwark they were forming. 

Shards of the black hole sharpened and hooked, aimed for Lance and all his fear of failure, Keith who didn’t belong there, Hunk who was afraid to fight -

And a very angry starfield flooded out between them, blending into and pulling on all of them, laying claim.

Shiro had spent the last two years terrified of who and what he was becoming, survival instinct and fear and a need to do something beaten and honed into a weapon, taught to kill as a reflex. He’d buried it, shoved it away, avoided it as much as he could, and Zarkon had finally pushed hard enough for it to come roaring out of the box.

Zarkon had made a weapon, found potential for violence he’d never known he had, but during that entire time, there had always been a growing, sharpened point aimed up out of the arena; all of the fear and anger and hatred found its proper target, the one responsible, the one who’d ordered all of it and was _not going to touch a single one of **his** people I’ll make you regret the weapon you made as the last thing you do_.

It wasn’t much ground gained, barely enough room to regain a little more awareness of something off the relay, to start pushing Voltron to move away even as Zarkon was trying to tighten his grip and pull it back; it took all five of them clinging together and trying to cover each other, and Zarkon was wearing at it, digging claws in to drag them down and wear out their energy to fight back on brute force alone. 

It was hard to fathom how much they’d been pulling against until the explosions rocked the command center and Zarkon’s concentration was interrupted, a brief moment of confused surprise and frustrated anger before his attention was yanked away from them. 

Voltron lurched forward with a sudden burst as the pressure pulling back vanished, then stopped, a tangled conglomerate of rattled nerves and tired shock that was trying to find mental footing again. 

Keith had grown somewhat used to the changes in intensity. It was louder in the lions, yes, but functioning as one interlinked unit was an entirely different state; it usually took so much focus on their surroundings and coordinating that it was hard to pay attention to anything else while Voltron was together, and the Lions lent some guardrails against mentally wandering or rabbit-chasing, but Keith was always left a little off-kilter afterwards re-adjusting to not having all the edges between him and everyone else intertangled, the heightened awareness slowly processing. 

The amount they’d all just had to not just coordinate, but focus on trying to thread everything into one piece Zarkon couldn’t break apart, was something else entirely. It hadn’t even been very long, only a matter of minutes maybe showing on the readouts, but it felt like the short confrontation had taken ages. When Shiro gave the order to split up and go back, it was almost disorienting to separate. He could still pick up on the others; most of it was varying shades of disorientation and adrenaline, although Shiro still had one foot in part of his mind he usually shoved in a box and avoided, simultaneously too exhaused, keyed up, angry, and worried to care about it for the time being. 

It was both almost alarming and painful to have other people that close, to pull out of the intertwined protective blanket, and something where there was a creeping dread of it sinking in as he sorted out what he’d caught of Zarkon’s intent before Shiro had drowned it out in his own struggles. 

Zarkon was aiming at, and fully intending to drag out, everything any of them had been hiding or didn’t want to share with the others - Lance’s insecurities and lousy sense of self-worth _Do you really think you’re capable of being a Paladin? You’re nothing more than dead weight_ , Hunk’s anxiety and hatred of fighting _You’re a coward, you know you don’t belong on a battlefield_ , and what Keith actually was.

 _You’re mine twice over._

Part of him wanted to find a way to keep the close sense of presence where there was no opening to question that they would be there for each other - that he had _people_. 

Part of him wanted to run away from ever touching it again, because if they ever got that closely tangled again and _anything_ brought attention to what he was, everyone would know, and “I’m Galra, the same as the monsters we’ve been fighting” was something a world different from “I’m a girl” as secrets went. _They don’t know what you are. Do you think they would allow you so close if they did?_

And then Red was landing and there wasn’t any time to try to sort through coming down from the altered state or pay much attention to hearing echoes of Zarkon’s voice in his head again, because they had to get the Castle away.

************************************************************************

The showers might have been a set of pods in small sub-rooms of one larger room, but they at least had closing screens on the sub-room, sealed individually, and were a little bigger and worlds better than the stolen-from-a-cheap-hotel showers in the dorms at the Garrison. Keith had once asked Coran about why they only had half-baths and not showers attached to each of their rooms, and Coran had rattled off something about the water recycling system, but Keith had a weird suspicion they weren’t actually in Paladin’s quarters, but other crew rooms, because the proper quarters likely hadn’t been touched since their predecessors had inhabited them.

He was still not entirely comfortable with going through his predecessor’s things. Not only would it be awkward and uncomfortable sifting through a dead person’s things, there was the increasingly awkward question still hanging of which lion had been Alfor’s. Right now that was narrowed down to him or Hunk, and he was perfectly happy leaving that question in Schrodinger’s box, with each of them both Alfor’s successor and not Alfor’s successor. 

And if the idea of digging through a dead person’s things to potentially find out that said dead person was Allura’s father was awkward and uncomfortable for him and Hunk, he definitely appreciated not leaving Shiro digging through whatever Zarkon might’ve left behind. 

He didn’t know if Hunk had gone through whatever had been stored in Yellow by his predecessor yet, but asking would mean opening Schrodinger’s box. He hoped the lack of any signs of awkward tangles between Hunk and Allura meant “Hunk hasn’t gone through it”, and not “Hunk went through it and it wasn’t Alfor’s”, because he wasn’t sure Hunk was on good enough terms with the idea of ‘discretion’ to not approach Allura with anything he found. 

That was when he remembered he hadn’t had time to do anything about the mess Ralar had made in Red’s internal chamber. The Lion at least caught that to note that she’d kept the gravity and inertial damping static as much as was possible; everything should still be about where it’d been the last time he’d been in there. 

He draped against the curved wall, using one of the fixtures for support. They hadn’t properly rested since Olkarion, and after confronting Zarkon and getting to be physical props for the Teludav, all of them had reached a point past exhaustion. He was singed and stuck slowly scrubbing through layers of sweat, grime, and dust with a base layer of Olkari dirt that had somehow only gotten fused further in his brief and abrupt introduction to the antigravity pool. 

At this point, if Zarkon showed up again, he was ready to propose powering down the castle and letting Zarkon board it, just so he could make an attempt at personally shoving his bayard down Zarkon’s throat. Red agreed with him that it was the most idiotic, suicidal idea he’d ever had, but that it had a certain attraction right now and was a nice daydream.

He stumbled out after he managed to scrub down enough to feel less subhuman, wrapping in one of the warmer robes he’d managed to find. One of these days he was going to go looking for cold weather gear just to see if it existed and if the Altaeans had somehow found a way to stubbornly impose their apparent love of lighter fabrics on it. 

He’d actually managed to forget that they’d all pretty much unanimously decided, after everything that’d been going on, that “shower” was slightly more of a priority than “sleep”, enough to run straight into Hunk as soon as he stepped out of the sliding divider. 

Hunk blinked at him with a brief noise of confusion. He half-stumbled back.

And then Hunk had picked him up in a hug that was almost enough to put the wind out of him, leaving him tensing in confusion and surprise for a moment.

“You know I’d almost started getting used to all that and taking it for granted, but man, I still mean what I said back when we first figured out how to form Voltron, maybe more than ever.” Hunk put him down, both hands on his shoulders steadying him while he got his feet back, then pulled him in again, at least less bone-crushing; he relaxed into it, leaning on Hunk and tiredly returning it. Of course Hunk would’ve only really come out of that riding the interconnected tangle of it all. He probably wasn’t even paying attention to-

“And I don’t know or care why Zarkon thinks he can try to say you’re his, you’re not. You’re ours, you got that? One of us. Nothing he says is going to make us hate you.” 

He suddenly felt less tired and way more awake. “Uh. Thanks?” He gave Hunk’s upper arm an awkward pat; he didn’t have much range of movement and couldn’t reach Hunk’s shoulder like that. “You’re not a coward, either. He’s an asshole.” 

Hunk squeezed a little tighter and Keith could feel some of his bones shift. 

Then something else caught Hunk’s attention, and he was moving, one hand still on Keith’s shoulder.

Lance was practically sleepwalking before he was pulled in with an awkward squawk, Hunk picking both of them up easily in another hug that left Keith finding air for a couple seconds. 

Hunk had a lot of weight, and Keith was even more sure that anymore, most of it was actually muscle. Lance’s arms were pinned awkwardly, and he squirmed after a second, with a breathless gasp of “Love you too, buddy, but I need those ribs”. Hunk didn’t put them down, but did loosen his grip a little with a sheepish ‘sorry’ and a grin that turned a little worried.

“You know you’re not useless, right?” Hunk’s attention was on Lance, even if he was still carrying Keith.

There was a flicker of a frantic glance at Keith before Lance laughed, suddenly all cheer and bravado. “Come on, you think I care what that rusty old zombie says?” 

Keith set his jaw; he’d overheard Lance’s insecurities more than often enough even if he hadn’t known Zarkon was smart enough to pay attention and aim where he knew it would hurt. “It’s all bullshit anyway. He was just trying to throw us off so he could separate us again, because he couldn’t do it while we were all holding together like that.”

Lance stared at him like he’d actually sprouted purple ears and fur; Hunk gave his arm a squeeze with one hand and smiled, finally putting them down, although he kept a hand on Lance’s shoulder. 

Keith adjusted the loose Altaean robe, catching sight of Shiro leaning on one of the dividers a few feet behind Hunk. He’d actually scrounged up stray clothes with longer sleeves, although it was just an overshirt right now with a neck open enough for a few stray scars to be visible. Shiro was smiling, although he was still carrying a tension that didn’t seem to weigh as jarringly as usual after a battle. 

He had to be just as tired as everyone else, too, even if he wasn’t acting like it - or rather, even if the exhaustion had worn through the energy Shiro had to shove away everything Zarkon had managed to jar loose. 

The smile didn’t seem forced, at least, and he didn’t startle when Hunk turned around and spotted him, only hold a hand up until Hunk toned down his approach a little; on edge but he wasn’t lapsing away from physical contact like he usually did when he was still tense from reminders. 

Shiro trying to reverse Hunk’s game of picking people up with a hug and managing for a few seconds before giving up on it put Keith’s worries a little more at ease for the time being. 

Pidge tried to slip past while Hunk was preoccupied, ducking around Lance, but Hunk spotted her, turning with a “Oh no you don’t!”; Pidge froze, accepting the hug before squirming loose to climb up and sit on his shoulders. They walked out that way, Lance following after, and there was the beginning of some kind of dumb joke fading into the hallway as the doors closed behind them. It distractedly occurred to him that Zarkon hadn't shot anything at her, but there had definitely been intent, just not something direct or with as much clarity to it - 

Red nudged him for overthinking. It wasn't direct; getting any of the others to buckle while the connections were so loud would've been its own blow to Pidge, who was throwing her entire existence into trying to prevent Zarkon from taking anyone away from her.

Shiro walked up to rest the metal hand on his shoulder; Keith relaxed, leaning into it tiredly, and Shiro shifted to put the arm around his shoulders, letting him lean.

“You know Zarkon’s going to try to use whatever you're hiding against you again if he gets the chance.” Probably when, not if.

Keith tensed, suddenly more aware of the prosthetic and another part of what it meant. It was Shiro’s arm, and it, the scars, and everything from the past two years were what the Galra had inflicted on him. “Can we have this conversation after sleep, and not out in the open like this?”

Shiro sighed, looking away. “Yeah. We can. Don’t try to put it off too long, alright?”

“I won’t.” Keith tugged away, suddenly feeling less like he should be around Shiro; Shiro would notice something was bothering him and try to get him talking, and he didn’t want to dump that on Shiro after that kind of a close call.

And he was more afraid than he wanted to admit of how Shiro would react. Even if Shiro accepted it, after everything Shiro had been through, it’d be almost expected for it to be harder for him to be that comfortable with Keith; he remembered well enough how Shiro had frozen when he’d snarled back on Arus, and the weight of snarling hurt and anger at what the Galra had done to him that’d come out in the fight. 

He was trying not to pay attention to the echoes of Zarkon hissing in his head; the thought of the others pulling away just as he was starting to feel like he had a place was bad enough, he didn’t know if he could handle Shiro.


	24. A voice whispers in the gales like in the songs and childhood tales

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shiro and Red take advantage of Keith cleaning up after Ralar's mess to prod at him; Allura makes an attempt at fishing for what's wrong during the long hours first leaving in the pod, and after Taujeer, Pidge finally gets around to some of the Garrison server files.

His sleep had been restless and light; after a few hours of half failing at it, he wandered down to the hangar, to try and do something useful with his insomnia. There was no telling how much time they’d bought, and he couldn’t just leave Red’s internal chamber a mess.

Some of it had shifted, but it wasn’t much worse than what he’d left. He set to gathering up bits of clothing and haphazardly folding them, trying not to pay too much attention to what he was picking up. He didn't want to find any clues to what was in Schrodinger’s Box. Red was watching his stubborn avoidance with exasperated amusement, but was keeping the answer to herself, at least. It mostly seemed like it basic stashed travel clothes, easier to ignore any potential for identifying marks.

He had to wonder how many species were represented in the original Paladins - if there’d been more than one of any species and how many of the others ended up with Altaean or Galran or other clothes just because of proximity; he was pretty sure he found a few things that were dramatically different in style from the Altaean clothes they’d been finding.

Red dangled awareness of the answer, and he declined it, still avoiding the Schrodinger’s box. 

The food bars probably ruled out the previous Paladin being Galra. He was briefly curious himself, but then remembered that Ralar had been starting to get sick from them when they left, and decided not to chance it, stuffing them back into the storage compartment to deal with later. 

“So what was whatever she’d found when I walked in?”

The screen popped up nearby while he was eyeing the half-built tent; there was an entire directory there. Red gave the summary of the headings as a history archive, the one that was highlighted being Zarkon’s initial meeting with the Altaean royals. 

He had a feeling which Red confirmed that the lady Zarkon had been speaking to initially was Allura’s mother. 

“So you’ve got a lot of Galra history from before Zarkon lost it in there?” He sat down cross-legged, fighting with the pieces of the tent. He wasn’t sure how it went together, but he could tell what had been done wasn’t it.

The directory list pulled out to an entire tree. 

He sighed, struggling with a stubborn joint that was visibly meant to separate. “I want to see it, just… now isn’t a good time. We don’t know how much time we have.” He needed to get everything picked up and stowed, and further pursuit was still a matter of when, not if.

The lion was oddly quiet, and then nudged a different direction - the secrets he was sitting on, the question of what he would have done if Shiro hadn’t interrupted Zarkon trying to pry at the rest of them. Shiro had predicted Zarkon trying to exploit it against him that way and had been right. 

“I am not telling everyone I’m Galra while we’re all exhausted balls of nerves.” It was making it easier to just mechanically autopilot the cleaning.

Red started tallying down things he tried to ignore for the sake of his nerves.

If he didn’t tell them, Zarkon would first chance he got.

Someone was going to catch him opening doors or accessing terminals.

Sooner or later Lance would stop and think enough to put together him closing the hangar panel and seeing in the dark better than human.

Pidge had said something about working on the armor and that meant her going over the detailed biometric readouts.

Sooner or later he was going to get injured in the field badly enough to land in one of the cryopods, and that would make it impossible to miss.

One of them might figure out from a stray nightmare loose on the relay. 

Any of them seeing his knife without the wrapping he used to hide the rune on it would have questions.

Coran -

“Will you shut up already?!” He shut the storage compartment harder than he needed to, leaning his forehead and arm on the wall. “I get it, it’s a miracle nobody’s just overheard me panicking over it!”

There was a sardonic echo-back from the lion of third hand impressions she’d gotten from the other lions that his fear of them turning on him was louder than his internal struggle over being Galra. He was disconcertingly aware of brief notice from the other lions, a flicker of panic headed off by exasperated assurance that they weren’t going to draw attention to it for the moment. 

Zarkon had tried, but Lance had been distracted by getting aimed at himself, Pidge had been actively and aggressively tuning out anything Zarkon said to the point of mentally singing obnoxious rounds to drown it out, Hunk had been still intent on trying to block Zarkon from the others as much as he could. It wasn’t something that would last much longer.

“Look, this isn’t like with Pidge -”

There hadn’t been any sense of movement, but he was suddenly much more aware of Shiro, still tired, haggard, a mass of frustration, bracing for alarms, and sharp edges closer to the surface than normal. He tried to tell himself Shiro was probably in the other hangar working with Black since he hadn’t felt the lion move, then the door opened, and he remembered the inertial dampers and localized gravity control. 

He muttered a few swear words at the lion, not lifting his head from where he had it resting against the wall. He could see Shiro leaning in the doorframe after the door closed. 

“I’m fine.”

Shiro raised an eyebrow, and calling bullshit out loud felt like a courtesy of habit. “I don’t think anyone is ‘fine’ right now.”

He could guess why Shiro was there, between how done with everything he was and the way Red was watching. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I know. Unfortunately, Zarkon obviously does want to talk about it.” 

And Shiro had decided it wasn’t something they could keep avoiding and dancing around. 

Keith turned his back to the door, walking past the screen where Red still had the history archive up to shove some of the containers back into compartments in the walls, trying to broadcast as loud as he can that he was not going to be pushed into this just because he was cornered.

Shiro apparently had been figuring it out himself, as there was the image wedged in very pointedly of him, back in the desert, kneeling down to prod at a dark-and-tan snake that was shaking a naked tail for all it was worth, flattening its own head and hissing. 

Keith glared over his shoulder, stifling a growl. 

“Look, you don’t have to tell everyone. At least tell _me_ so I can do damage control if Zarkon gets another shot and actually manages to finish his sentence.” 

He bristled, wanting to get away more; Shiro was one of the people with the most reason to be impacted by it, and one of the ones he was finding himself most afraid of talking to on it. 

“Keith…” Shiro sighed, making an effort to pull in some of his own tired sharp edges and focus more on the very real and nagging worry - he knew Keith was hurting, and in danger of getting hurt worse. “You’re the one who keeps nagging me to let others help, and it’s good advice. You were right. I don’t think any of us are going to make it if we don’t look out for each other.” 

It was hard not to flinch at the reminder that Shiro probably was right about endangering everyone by avoiding it. He closed his eyes, leaning on the hatch he’d just closed in the wall, and Red gave her own nudge on it, a warm push toward at least Shiro who’d always been there for him in the past even if he wasn’t ready to face anyone else yet. 

“Shiro…” He swallowed hard, trying to pull the knot out of his throat thinking about it, and finally just forced it out fast. “I’m Galra.” 

He braced for the reaction, eyes still closed; there wasn’t any kind of shift that he could sense, and it was unnerving, leaving him waiting for it to sink in.

“I know. I figured it out a while ago.” 

Keith froze; he had enough mental tallies of times he’d accidentally let something slip as it was, but he realized he probably knew the answer. “Back on Arus…you were lying about not knowing what I sounded like, weren’t you.” Shiro had frozen, and that close after his captivity, of course an angry Galra vaguely within his space would have been more than enough to set off all kinds of reflexive alarms. 

He heard Shiro shift. “…Yeah. I didn’t want to upset you more and I wasn’t sure what to do with it at the time, either.” There was actual guilt bleeding through his worry. “If I’d known what was coming, I would’ve told you - before Zarkon could get to you.” 

Shiro had known all along. 

“I don’t think the others have figured it out yet.”

He looked back over his shoulder; Shiro had his arms crossed, eyes on the wall. “How can you be sure?”

“Well, Pidge hasn’t started plotting how to use you to get past locked doors and break into their systems yet. Lance is still pretty oblivious and I think he’d probably have a more visible reaction. I don’t know about Hunk, it’s possible he’s just being careful about it, but he’s really bad at not just blurting things out sometimes.” 

Sadly, he couldn’t argue any of it. He wasn’t feeling any more up to talking about most of it than he had been a few minutes ago, even if one part of the panic was bleeding out. He was dead sure Shiro had been putting at least as much effort into learning to keep things off the relay and block outside intrusions as he had, being Zarkon’s primary target, but he’d also seen Shiro defending Ulaz while they’d all still been paranoid, and if Ulaz was the one who’d worked on his arm while feigning loyalty to Zarkon, then Ulaz would’ve been harder on his nerves than Keith would ever be. 

Shiro wouldn’t turn on him, and that was at least something, just enough tension bleeding off to remember that he hadn’t really slept for days. He sat down on one of the compartments that was built into the walls, leaning on his knees. 

For a moment, Shiro almost said something, the worry still nagging, but Keith’s exhaustion must’ve been obvious; he opened his mouth, then after a moment, closed it, just walking over to rest a hand on Keith’s shoulder. “Get some rest, alright?”

Keith nodded, and Shiro squeezed his shoulder in an attempt at reassurance before leaving the lion. 

He headed back to his room not long after; halfway back to his room, there was some nagging thing he was forgetting that began catching back up.

Zarkon had definitely taken some interest, even if Shiro was the primary target, and the nagging feeling he’d been marked had redoubled after the last close encounter.

Something had changed after the fight where he’d been in such close contact with Zarkon. If Zarkon had been tracing Allura or even the Black Lion, then it seemed to Keith that Zarkon would’ve started the pursuit predator act as soon as he could; he would’ve known the second the Black Lion woke up and gone after it, or been triangulating Allura to at least turn any approach to a Galra outpost into a trap, yet they’d had entire days and weeks where there was no sign of close pursuit, and managed to ambush a few Galra ships and bases. 

The one thing that he knew had changed had been Zarkon getting claws deep into him. Who knew what Zarkon had figured out how to do with the link in ten thousand years? Hagar had been able to leave shreds of power in Shiro, what would stop Zarkon from using the connection to do the same to him? 

Asking Allura had occurred to him, but brought its own problems - first that there was no way in Hell she could sift through his energy that thoroughly without realizing he wasn’t human, and second that the entire problem with Zarkon was that he _belonged_ on the relay. He wasn’t a foreign entity invading somewhere it didn’t have a connection. It had often felt like there was some sliver of something left in him, a splinter driven in that he couldn’t quite work loose.

When he finally did drift back to sleep, the nightmares returned with a vengeance, nearly as bad as right after that fight.

****************************

There was no sign of anyone else awake when the pod slipped out of the Castle. It couldn’t hyperspace jump or wormhole or anything else long-range by alien standards, but it could still make time fast enough to get them a few systems over before anyone had a chance to realize they were gone. 

He didn’t want to admit to her that if she hadn’t come along, and they had come for him, he’d been fully prepared to just go down fighting and die to cut off Zarkon’s ability to trace the others. Red had been Unamused in his head the entire time he’d been packing and preparing to go. She wasn’t pulling to STOP him, as she recognized that he needed to know for sure that he wasn’t the one putting them at risk, but Red had made it very clear she thought it was an awful idea, and was not happy with him planning to put that much distance between them, much less that a suicide run if he turned out to be right was also a part of his plan.

He had felt the lion’s mental wheels turning that she had her own ideas about _that_ , but she didn’t share them beyond an eye-rolling agreement to not lead the others to him and bring Voltron to Zarkon if it came down to it. Red had approved of Allura going along, if only because of knowing as soon as Keith did what that did to his suicide run plans - 

As long as Allura was there, he had to make sure she made it out, which meant the worst case scenario went from “go down in a blaze of glory” to “find some way to at least get her out of reach and to safety”. That did include bailing on the pod and sending her elsewhere; he was the one better armed and armored, and better prepared to survive to make sure they weren’t able to hunt her down as well.

As they left the system, the presence in his head went quieter, more distant, until he could barely feel the ember that was a permanent mark on him. It was disconcerting, but then, Coran had said that the lion shouldn’t be able to reach further than within the same solar system. 

They still had a couple hours before they’d be anything he would consider a safe distance; there’d been awkward silence so far, and he realized it’d been a while since he’d talked to her much, too preoccupied with everything else on top of fear of her finding out what he was. 

He’d gone a good half of his life learning to better survive people turning on him and pulling away by keeping distance and being wary of overtures; it was a little late for it with her, after the months or year or so they’d spent in space, but after Ulaz, she was the one he was expecting the worst reaction from. 

“Have you been quite alright?” 

He started out of staring at the starfield past the controls. Allura was still sitting straight in her seat, hands folded in her lap, and had apparently been watching him for part of the trip with uncertain concern. 

“…I’m fine. Just tired.” She didn’t look like she entirely believed it. “And… all of this.” He gestured vaguely at the pod and space beyond it; she nodded.

“I’m not sure anyone has really been ‘fine’ of late.” She was definitely trying to keep her usual poise, but it was fraying around the edges, and it occurred to Keith that not only had she not been getting any more sleep than the rest of them, she also was needing to feed energy into the teludav every time they’d made an escape. Added to knowing that she tried to hide things more than Shiro did, and she was probably downright haggard.

“At least we should know soon how he keeps finding us.” His own nerves weren’t in great shape, and the more distance they put between them and the system the Castle was in, the more he was finding himself waiting for the living black hole to turn up in the back of his mind. 

She made an acknowledging noise, frowning under her faceplate and staring into the stars. “You’ve been more distant than usual lately.” 

He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I’ve been tired, and had a lot on my mind lately.” 

She waited a beat or two, and then when he wasn’t continuing, she was watching him thoughtfully, considering something. “Why have you been thinking he could pinpoint you?” Her tone was careful, patient, avoiding a confrontation.

“I… well, I mean. Before the fight at central command, he wasn’t tracking us like this, and…” He frowned. “You made sure Hagar hadn’t left anything on Shiro, but he was… pushing pretty hard over the relay. I thought if he’d left some kind of mark that way, he might have a way to use me to track everyone, and since the relay doesn’t show up on any sensors or get interference…”

She inclined her head, thinking harder and mouthing an occasional stray thought to herself. “It’s tied to the lions, so it shouldn’t be any more effective over distance even if he did find some way to brand you.” There was distinct anger and disgust, the same that often came up around Zarkon’s worse atrocities; she apparently did think a mark of that sort was possible. She raised a hand, turning towards him. “If he did leave something behind, I might be able to-”

He flinched, pulling back toward the far side of the pod. “No!” She pulled back, eyes wide at his sudden near-panic; he took a couple deep breaths, trying to gather his nerves. “No, it’s - if it’s something using the relay then it’s not like it’d show up as some kind of foreign thing that doesn’t belong, right?” His voice wobbled no matter how hard he was trying to act calm.

She sat back in her seat, shifting to give more space, folding her hands back in her lap, concern and edges of anger and something sickened on her face. “It’s…” She took a slow breath, composing herself to something more neutral. “The Castle would have difficulty, but his energy is _substantially_ different from Shiro’s, and I doubt the Black Lion would take any offense. That said, the last thing I want is to worsen any damage he’s caused.” He realized she’d read it as a trauma reaction from what assaults Zarkon had managed, similar to Shiro’s before, and there was a pang of guilt for lying to her like that, even if he did feel his chest tighten at the idea of someone else digging around in him that way that wasn’t Red or maybe one of the others. “The bonds between the lions, and the paladins, are sacred. Seeing them twisted and abused like this…” She shook her head slowly. 

“Zarkon’s the one making that decision. The sooner we can find a way to get rid of him, the sooner that will stop.” It shook him out of some of the rattled nerves and guilt pangs; he caught enough of that from Shiro, and he glanced over in warning in case she did try to apologize for Zarkon’s actions. 

She composed herself with a measured breath, sitting straighter. “I wish I could do more to help.”

“You already do plenty - without you, we’d be dead in the water.” She was the only one who could work the teludav, after all, and it was a necessity.

“It’s not the same.” She motioned at his armor. “Nearly every battle we’ve fought, I watch all of you risking your lives for all of us, and the most that I can do is covering fire from the castle and wait. I know the last time I tried to do more was a disaster, but…”

He didn’t like the idea of putting her at more risk, but at the same time, he’d also been training with her enough to know she could easily keep up with him. “I think anything we do runs the risk of shit like that happening. I’m amazed we haven’t had more disasters, honestly.” God knew they’d had enough close calls and times things had gone wrong, including them nearly getting trapped or actually getting trapped and just having better luck getting away… and that wasn’t getting into things like Sendak managing to take the Castle. “We might be able to figure something out.” 

She gave him a weak smile, and went quiet. 

******************************************

After they’d managed to catch each other, before he managed to call Red, he’d definitely noticed Allura clinging on in more ways than one. Her power was still something that felt warm and bright, even if it was making static electricity prickles with how tense she was, wobbling between seeping in enough for him to almost flinch and her pulling it back, trying to mind boundaries. 

He hated that shielding and pulling back to keep her from seeing made him feel like a cockroach scrambling to get away from a light, and hated the thread of guilt that went with it when he didn’t really _want_ to block her out that much. He knew she wouldn’t be nearly that comfortable with him if she knew what he was shielding back, and letting it go while lying to her about what he was felt like taking advantage even if he was terrified enough of saying anything that he didn’t think he could make words work or pull shields down if he tried. 

Red scooped both of them up carefully, and didn’t close her jaws or turn around until she had caught part of the debris from the ship - a handful of shards of scrap metal and his increasingly worn and battered duffel bag, with everything he owned in it. He picked it up on his way to the cockpit, and caught a brief, amused smile from Allura as he shouldered it and patted the walls absently.

“Thanks, buddy.”

There was a blur of warmth in response as the lion made to meet back up with the others. 

*********************************************

Knowing he wasn’t what Zarkon was tracking at least helped with the nerves. He did worry about Shiro now that they knew it was the Black Lion, but Shiro still seemed to be mostly aiming his own pent up frustration and torn nerves at turning around with claws out and finding something to do about it, which was reassuring. 

He still had the looming spectre of what he was, worrying about how everyone else would react - particularly Allura - and worrying about Zarkon throwing it out in the open for him. 

There was a brief, odd lull regardless, the Castle making for somewhere further out to get something closer to proper rest. 

It was something like whatever passed for early morning still when Pidge called all of them to the bridge; she’d apparently been up earlier than the others, her laptop and her spread of interface cables spread out around her console. He recognized a couple of the Garrison server blades he’d given her hooked up to it. She had her console projected onto a larger panel, idle and waiting, and was folded up in her chair looking oddly grim.

“So. Hunk, Lance, you guys remember how I’d been listening in on Galra transmissions and trying to figure out how to translate and decode them, right?” 

They both nodded. 

“Well, the thing that’d bothered me even back then is that I was basically an amateur with home-built tech; it wasn’t _that_ hard to find their signals - yes Keith I know some of the conspiracy boards picked up on snatches occasionally, but you know as well as I do what their attempts at figuring out or even keeping track of frequencies our technology could perceive looked like.” She rolled her eyes, and he nodded in agreement with the frustrated disgust at the idiocy that infested most of the boards. “Anyway it bothered me that you know, the Garrison had _much_ better equipment than I had access to, but there was no sign of them acknowledging anything; if I could get a good bead on their communications with a laptop and my jury-rig antennae and dishes, they should’ve heard something _way_ ahead of me, and with actual linguists and cryptography teams to work on what they got. They had to have found something.”

She brought up a handful of files. “Well, I wasn’t wrong - one of those server blades you brought me was mostly dedicated to a really viciously encrypted directory that was just labeled ‘Manticore’, and now with the Lions letting us understand alien languages or something….” 

She opened one of the audio files; half the team stiffened at Sendak’s voice, having a very irritable conversation with a harried-sounding Galra about survey results and site searches, the other Galra complaining about having scoured every inch of ‘that frozen underwater hellscape’.

Pidge killed the file. 

“Manticore?” Allura tilted her head at it.

“It’s a monster from Earth mythology,” Keith answered. “They have a body like a lion or tiger, a human face, and the teeth of a shark; in some of the stories they speak and lure travelers off to eat them.” 

She nodded grimly. Shiro had gone still, staring at the screen, expression blank; Keith edged over closer on one side, hand brushing the back of his prosthetic, and he saw Lance sidling closer on the other side. 

“It gets worse,” Pidge continued. “I found old SETI files going all the way back to 1988, and if I’m reading the notations the Garrison people left, they honestly don’t _know_ if they were around the solar system before that, because that’s when they first developed something capable of occasionally catching edges of a signal… the files just sort of sat around with nobody sure if it was a signal or some kind of space noise until the Garrison managed to get better at picking up the signals and started comparing them to older data.” 

“…So the Galra were hanging around the edges of the solar system for at least a century?” Hunk measured each word carefully, giving the screen a wary, nervous look.

Pidge made a grouchy “Mm-hmm”, fidgeting with the files again. 

“Why didn’t they bother Earth? I mean we were right there, they could’ve invaded us any time.” 

“From what I could tell from their conversations… they didn’t think we were worth the time yet. No signs of resources on Earth that would be worth the effort, and we hadn’t come up with anything worth paying attention to or seeing if we’d be worth the trouble to conquer. There were a couple of snark comments about the old Paladin’s pets starting to grow up in one of them.” Pidge paused; Allura bristled and even Coran stiffened with a brief scowl. “Most of their transmissions and work seemed to be centered on two places - Europa and Enceladus.” She called up a solar system diagram with the two moons highlighted.

One of Jupiter’s moons and one of Saturn’s. 

Allura was studying the system diagram, guarded. “What was on those moons that had their attention?”

Lance shrugged, one hand carrying most of the gesture. “I dunno. There’s not anything there but -” He trailed off, the confusion suddenly sobering.

“Water and ice,” Keith finished. 

It didn’t take anything more; they all remembered where Yellow and Green had been hidden, how they’d been secreted away in places with a large amount of their elements. 

“If I pieced together bits right, after the old paladin died, the Galra apparently thought they’d been trying to fake out and lead them away if the Lion still existed?” Pidge closed most of the directories. “So they were checking the other places within pod travel range that seemed like they’d fit Blue’s affinities…which didn’t include being buried under a river deep in a canyon in the middle of a desert.” 

“Always was a clever one…”, Coran mumbled, wistful and distant. 

Keith shifted to be more in contact with Shiro, wrapping a hand tight around the metal wrist. “They knew they were out there all along.” 

Shiro finally remembered to breathe; Keith caught the movement of parts as the hand clenched into a fist, and noticed on the edge of his vision that Lance had an arm draped over Shiro’s shoulder on the other side. They’d caught Allura’s attention on the other side of Lance, and she was watching cautiously, apparently gauging whether or not it was a good idea to go any closer; Hunk was behind all of them, and not far away.

The metal hand relaxed. “You know, I’d wondered about that ever since we were caught.” It was worn and resigned, the voice of someone who wished he hadn’t expected that answer; the tension in Shiro’s shoulders loosened. “Battlecruisers aren’t real subtle ships, it had to’ve shown up on probes sometime if Sendak was around at all.”

“It did.” Pidge gestured at the server blade, but didn’t pull up the images. 

There was a silence on the bridge. Allura finally opted to lean on the back of Pidge’s chair, reining in bits of quiet, cold horrified outrage. “So your people knew about the Galra and said nothing to you before sending you on a mission right under their noses?” 

“Yeah, that’s about what it looks like.” Shiro shrugged, although he was minding the other two that were leaning on him. 

Pidge closed it, leaning back in her seat, still tense and carrying her own quiet, impotent anger. “From the notes, they were just trying to ignore it and hope the Galra kept not caring about humans.” 

“I am not surprised.” Hunk folded his arms. “I know we told you the whole story about how we got out here, right? The one that started with Pidge hauling us out when the pod Shiro had escaped in came down, and the Garrison people treating him like some alien from an old cheesy movie?”

Keith winced, having had plenty of his own nightmares about scientists more interested in a specimen than recognizing they were dealing with a sapient being and faked alien autopsy videos, and looked up to check that Shiro wasn’t freezing again at that; Shiro just looked tired and grouchy about it. Allura had looked back over her shoulder to Hunk with a nod. 

“Yeah. Chased us halfway across the desert. Absolutely no help whatsoever.” 

“I figured they had to know something when they announced the Kerberos mission a loss before there’d even been enough time for a real investigation.” Keith was still bitter about it, even if it didn’t have quiet the urgency it used to have. “That’s why I left. ...and got in trouble with them.” 

Allura looked between them, and back to the screen, shaking her head. “Well, whenever we do manage to go back near your home planet, all of you are Paladins first, and I hope they have the sense to respect you holding positions of rank and esteem outside of their jurisdiction - because if they don’t, they’ll be answering to me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some of the first bits I had written for this, back when it was just a few drabble-scenes, was a pretty drastically different version of Shiro cornering Keith about being Galra - mostly altered for fitting into the timeline better, and split a little because some of it made more sense coming later once I looked over it again - and parts of the passage with Allura in the pod. It's a little surreal to finally be catching up to where I technically started.
> 
> (The VERY first parts written were the earliest rough drabble that became the first chapter, and just post the Blade of Marmora.) 
> 
> Chapter title is from Boat Song by Woodkid -  
> "A voice whispers in the gales  
> Like in the songs and childhood tales  
> Where krakens raging in the sea  
> Crack ships into a million pieces  
> Can we keep our bearing straight?"
> 
> I will tally up the other titles that came from lyrics and add them to notes or something, for anyone curious ~~and out myself to everyone for how bloody sprawling and weird my writing playlists are~~.


	25. I want something, I want everything, I want nothing, nothing else - I want someone, almost anyone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A few more adventures in poking at how the galaxy works in the space mall! Keith gets stuck with some of Lance's dreams, which end up being a mix of homesick and otherwise, and Coran finds time for more fussing.

Keith wasn’t sure if the mall was relaxing in how banally familiar it was, or oddly unsettling. There was nothing else to call it but a mall, it was a merchant hub station, but it was uncanny-valley familiar as a mall, some kind of weird byproduct of convergent societal evolution. It was a little surreal, to be in a civilian space and vanish into the background, just another random civilian as far as everyone around him was concerned; they’d either been on the ship or in war zones and around aftermath since they’d left Earth.

Even with the merfolk, they hadn’t really been out among the regular people, they’d been the Queen’s guests. 

He’d known since they’d started trying to track what was going on in the universe lately that there _was_ a decent population of races that were allowed to live and exist in relative peace, that functional section of population a regime like Zarkon’s relied on to keep stability by keeping them pacified enough to not care what happened past their doors; being in among them was its own kind of unsettling, because - variety of species aside - it really was so much like being back on Earth in any random city. 

And, much like on Earth, the people who were secure were very much the same as people who weren’t living under a genocidal tyranny; someone presented with just this image alone would have a hard time reconciling it with the atrocities happening elsewhere, under the same government. 

He had spotted a couple of Galra drones on standby guarding a door; smaller and built lighter and less imposing than the military drones they’d been fighting, but there nonetheless. They seemed to be in low-power mode, and at least one he wasn’t sure if it’d work if it were directly activated; there was loose, chewed-up wiring sticking out in places.

It was almost too bad Shiro both was preoccupied and wouldn’t have been able to show his face; there wasn’t much to give any reason to worry about sudden threats and it was, for the most part, a peaceful sense of normalcy. Aliens aside. 

The mix of species was almost like its own showcase of how vast the Empire had grown; even with trying not to look like he was paying attention, he’d given up on keeping count of how many new or unfamiliar races he was seeing. There was enough noise and new things that when he saw something a little less unfamiliar, he almost missed it in the shuffle.

He stopped a few yards past the shop and turned around, trying to verify he really had just seen what he thought.

The grey alien in the ball cap was watching him right back, in what he was pretty sure was tired befuddlement. 

He walked back, staring at the shop and its owner incredulously; he’d written off the “grey aliens” as a complete hoax when he was fourteen. Most of the documentation was so flimsy that he’d hit a point of being grouchy with how much talk of them there was on the forums he sifted through for any good information on aliens, frustrated to no end with how many hoaxes and delusions filled the boards.

And now there was a grey alien in a ball cap and a jacket giving him about as weird a look as he was giving the alien. 

He raised his hand, mouth open, and realized he was clean out of any idea what to even say to this.

“Yeah, I know. I’m surprised too. I’ve seen more Terrans today than I have in a good while.” The alien leaned in the door of the shop, apparently deeming Keith nonthreatening and little more than a passing curiosity and diversion. “I mean, you’re not the only Terrans loose in the galaxy, but you’ve got to be the only ones for several galaxies distance at least.” 

“I thought you people weren’t even real,” he blurted.

The grey laughed. “Yeah, that took less work than you’d think, you know? Enough people wanting attention enough to make things up pretty much did the work for us.”

“You’re part of the Empire?” 

“Nah. Not yet at least. Most of our territory’s outside their border still, the other side of your homeworld. We don’t have that much of a military so we’ve got a few hasty treaties in place to let us travel and trade, but everybody knows it’s only going to last until they expand further that way. Still, a decafeeb or two without getting shot at’s something.” The alien shrugged. 

He was quiet, trying to come up with a response. Apparently he was still looking bewildered enough to get a tired sigh.

“The abductions thing gets blown out of proportion, we’ve never been near Area 51, and I guess you’d call it a curiosity thing. You know. The little bitty species just growing up being kinda fascinating and all, we’re not the only ones that’ve swung through your system, it’s mostly pretty hands-off or at least ‘try not to get noticed’ since the Galra keep poking their noses out there looking for something and they get _really_ vicious if you start asking questions. Anything else or are you just going to catch flies all day?”

Keith closed his mouth, blinking widely. “That… covers a lot.” 

“I don’t suppose you’ve got any GAC burning a hole in your pocket or a major case of homesickness, do you?” 

“Not really.” It’d been months since the last time they’d really been close to any kind of currency.

The alien sighed, resigned. “Oh well. It was worth a try.”

“Sorry.” He shifted weight, not sure what else to make of this. “I uh. Good luck with the shop.” 

“Thanks.” The grey alien didn’t sound like they expected it to happen, but gave a lazy wave anyway as he turned to walk off.

Somewhere in his distracted meandering, he ended up finding some place with a few light-screen displays in among benches and a couple small fountains; he settled down to get off his feet, with a little curiosity at what was apparently the eternal commonality of news broadcasts in public places.

Half of it was only barely followable, a jumble of events, disasters, near-disasters, and random curiosities in places he didn’t recognize at all, presented with the assumption there’d be enough familiarity to not need explanation. There were a few reports of battles with ‘insurgent factions’, most of them not going that well for the rebels; if there was some group somewhere having major successes, it probably wouldn’t make the public broadcasts.

At one point during that chunk of reports, Pidge ran in, almost ran past him, then stopped and backpedaled. “KEITH! Do you have any money? It’s really important!”

“No?” He was even more lost than he had been on the reports of random political developments in alien worlds. “I’m more broke out here than I was on Earth.” 

“Damnit! Well, worth a try.” 

And Pidge darted off again, leaving him with more questions than answers.

He was distracted from too much wondering what had gotten into the Green Paladin by catching mention of Voltron in the broadcast.

“…lull in activity from the dangerous faction that stole the ancient weapon, after the Command Center itself was mobilized in pursuit, until a battlecruiser on a routine patrol was destroyed in a skirmish galaxies away from the last sighting. As usual, there seems to be little rhyme or reason to the attacks -”

“What’s got your attention?”

He started out of his focus on the screen; Lance had stopped nearby, in the middle of heading the same direction Pidge had left.

“Civilian news broadcasts.” He dropped his voice quieter. “Not really anything useful, but the Mu wasn’t kidding about us getting a reputation.” He nodded to the screen. “Try not to react.”

“-the exception of the renegade Champion, little is known about the others involved in the attacks, although there are heavily disputed rumors of _Altaean_ involvement.” The narration was running over what had to’ve been something recorded and sent from Sendak’s ship before it’d been destroyed; the angle and armor made it impossible to identify much besides red.

“Holy shit you’re on the news.” Lance blinked, then looked around to make sure there wasn’t anybody close enough to have heard him. 

“We cannot stress enough that the insurgent faction is incredibly dangerous; while they have not attempted to approach large settlements as yet, their assault on the home system of the command center means that we cannot rule the possibility out.” 

“So they’ve got these broadcasts painting us as the bad guys everywhere?” Lance had his hands shoved in his pockets, and was glancing around again nervously.

“You think they wouldn’t try to trash us in propaganda?” Keith leaned back on the bench. “The only one they have a clear picture of is Shiro; the armor makes it almost impossible to identify us out of it, and from the reception we’ve been getting, making us out to be the villains isn’t working that well.” 

“LANCE COME ON!” Pidge had reappeared, calling from the edge of the small courtyard.

Lance gave Keith an uncertain shrug, then yelled back, “I’m coming already!”, and ran off following. 

The news broadcast moved on not long after, and Keith wandered off, with the soon to be proven false impression that it would be an actually peaceful mission. 

***********************

As easily as Shiro decided it was time to seek out the Blade of Marmora, Keith was pretty sure he must’ve succeeded at finding a way to keep Zarkon from tracking the Black Lion. There wasn’t much chance to catch him on the side, and even with the noise of Lance, Coran, and Pidge narrating their visit to the swap moon, Keith was getting more distracted by the implications of their destination.

He’d been carrying the knife for most of his lifetime without a clue what it meant. Even now, all he had was that it was made from some material only found on a long-destroyed world, and that it had the same mark as Ulaz’s sword - Red had indicated it was partially ceremonial, that there was meaning to it, and Ulaz had indicated about the same.

Years of struggling through with the only clue to who and what he was coming from one mysterious knife, and he was actually close to the source. It was almost terrifying; it’d be the closest he’d ever been to family that wasn’t the human side, his grandparents, uncle, and aunt he’d been bounced through early on. He _wanted_ it to be different - for the Galra side of his family to finally be something that wasn’t awful, but at the same time, he wasn’t sure how much of the pit of expecting it to go badly was rational worry about his lack of any prior connection save a knife and questions, and how much of it was just being so used to anything like ‘family’ ending badly that he wasn’t sure how to process something different.

He was distracted through most of it, barely even noticing when someone said his name; he did catch, after a while, occasional half-worried thoughtful glances from Shiro.

He knew he’d shown Shiro the knife before Kerberos, back on Earth, but there was no way of knowing how much he remembered still; by the time it occurred to him to try to ask Shiro about it - to see if Shiro actually knew why this was something personally important and not just a chance at potentially major allies - everyone was splitting up to sleep before the jump, and Shiro looked both tired and like he actually might sleep alright.

Shiro had been through enough; letting Shiro get rest finally was more important than keeping him up with existential crises. Red was uncertain on that, but was taking the entire thing with a general sense of quiet confidence. It would work out, and whatever happened, the lion wasn’t going anywhere, and as long as that was true, he’d have a place and a purpose.

He still had a hard time getting to sleep, and when he did, at first the nightmares were waiting; waking up with fur and golden eyes, Allura turning on him, wearing imperial armor and standing behind Zarkon while Earth burned.

And then it wasn’t, everything going fuzzy and nonsensical for a brief while. There were bits of the nightmares trying to squirm in but nothing was holding still long enough. There were Galra ships over the desert, then it was a shoreline painted colors in the sunset; a firefight in the castle that had bits of some small city, then just became a quiet, hazy-heat morning with singing birds. He was back in the Garrison with teeth and claws coming in, but that didn’t hold, and then there was a quiet, dark corner outside with one of the girls from his class year that he only barely recognized but felt familiar with while the dream was going on.

Way more familiar than he’d remember when he woke up, muzzily shaking off the feeling of hands under his shirt and a kiss that’d gone from awkward to breathless in the confines of the hide-hole out of the way corner; just before he woke up there was a different kind of haze from the desert heat and hands wandering on both sides. 

He spent a long few minutes staring at the wall trying to decide how he felt, as he woke up enough to make the connection who’d have dreams involving shorelines, tropical and subtropical climate cities, and had apparently made out in some of the same weird hidden corners of the Garrison Keith had used as hideaways to get away from people.

Somehow, he was tired and frazzled enough for the discovery that it’d only been dumb luck that he’d never tripped across Lance on a “date” when he was trying to find a place to get away from the constant close quarters was more offensive and upsetting than running into another dream that had been rapidly tipping into way more than he wanted to know. 

Eventually he slunk out into the hallway to get something to drink, only to find that he hadn’t been the only one to have the idea.

“-riously, though, I thought you’d _listened_ and not gone for the crazy.”

“Look, you know how long that lasted, nothing actually came of it, and we’re literally like, a billion light-years away _and_ it’s been probably well over a year now.” Lance took a deep breath. “And you were-”

Hunk was already trying to get Lance’s attention and pointing at where Keith had come into the room with a bleary glare; Lance froze in the middle of what Keith guessed had been ‘you were right’, turning slowly and blinking widely.

Keith glared. It was a sure thing that Lance remembered the previous incident, the way he took an uncertain half-step back. 

He couldn’t actually find it to be as upset as before; he raised a hand, wanting to say something more acid, then gave up. “That was one of my spots where I’d go to read and get away from people.”

“I told you, you were broadcasting,” Hunk grumbled.

“Oh come on, it was outside on Garrison property, you didn’t own it! And you were never there when I was, anyway.” 

Keith made a noncommittal noise of annoyance, and walked around them to dig one of the pouches of water out of the compartment in the wall. 

He heard Lance’s irritated snort, which was interrupted by the door opening and the sound of some kind of soft impact; when Keith pulled his head out of the wall and looked, Pidge’s pillow was dropping to the ground, while Lance had a hand raised in a failure at blocking it. 

“I did _not_ need to see that.” She huffed, giving a minute for emphasis before she walked forward to retrieve her pillow. 

“It’s not like I have control over it.” Lance was half sulking, then paused, glancing back at Keith. “You aren’t plotting revenge or anything, right?”

Keith stared over the packet. “…No.”

Lance narrowed his eyes, dubious. 

He sighed. “Well, it wasn’t the nightmares.” 

“…So some of that was yours?” After a beat, Lance continued, “I mean, at this point, ‘Earth is burning’ nightmares could be pretty much any of us.”

“Yeah that’s not even the worst of it.” Keith shrugged; it wasn’t really something he wanted to talk about. “I never thought there’d be a day when it’d be a _relief_ to overhear that part of the inside of your head.” Red had been listening to his dodges with fond exasperation, but did wedge in a sense of approval and relief at him getting more accepting of Lance’s presence on the relay and everything that went with it, even if it was just reconsidering his priorities over what to be bothered by in the face of the nightmares and everything they were up against. 

“So what, are you saying you’d want to see more?”

It took Keith a moment to parse that Lance had been trying to get a reaction, and that was mostly helped along by the look of dawning regret that crossed Lance’s face a few beats later after he realized what he’d actually said. Hunk was just tiredly resigned as if this were normal, and Pidge was raising an eyebrow, arms wrapped around her pillow.

Even with the clues, Keith was still attempting to process how to respond. “…What?”

Pidge smiled. “Man, Lance, I know you’ve been hard-up, but I didn’t know you were that desperate.” 

Lance reached over with one hand to tug upward on her pillow and push it into her face.

“…Right.” Keith backed up toward the other door, still lacking any kind of actual response. “I’m just going to go … sit on the observation deck or something.” 

********************

He got distracted partway to the observation deck, nosing into random doors; he wasn’t even sure what all of the rooms were, but there was one with a few rows of large, empty tanks of water, and another with narrow troughs and low-hanging lights that he eventually parsed out into some kind of hydroponics setup, empty and unused.

The Castle was not a small ship, and the more he got to look around, the more clear it became that they were dealing with it as a shadow of what it should’ve been with a proper functioning crew. 

He’d found a few benches near some kind of testing lab; the lull ended up letting everything else creep in and catch back up, disturbing his thoughts of going back to sleep. A few more hours, and they’d be at the headquarters for the Blade of Marmora; a few more hours, and he’d be within reach of answers he’d almost given up on finding within his lifetime. 

He didn’t notice Coran entering until the Altaean had tapped him on the shoulder; he startled, jerking back on the bench. Coran neatly evaded getting hit in the flail, holding a bowl in front of him.

Keith took the bowl, staring at the white mash as if not sure what to do with it; sure, it was a break from the green reconstituted-seaweed goo, but it wasn’t much of one. 

“I noticed you hadn’t been eating much the last few days, so I thought I’d catch up and make sure. Have to take care of yourself if you’re going to be in good shape to win this, you know!” 

He stared at the bowl, sighed, and poked at it with the spoon. He hadn’t really eaten much, and only Hunk had really gotten close to food in the mall. 

Coran sat down next to him, giving enough space to not be crowding. “You’ve been distracted lately. Is something the matter?”

He flinched; the only person he wanted to talk to about being part Galra less was Allura. Coran hadn’t been as vocally hostile, but Keith knew he’d lost just as much and definitely had a distinct personal grudge against Zarkon and the Empire. “It’s just… I dunno. Everything lately?”

Coran nodded sympathetically. “Understandable. We haven’t really had much of anything for time in between things going wrong lately.” There was a pause; the bland soy-mash tasting goop at least would give Keith an excuse to not talk much if he was eating. “And you seemed pretty worried there, about Zarkon tracking you; I almost tried to pilot the Red Lion myself while you were away.” 

Coran chuckled, and Red did have an image of Coran in some kind of flamboyant version of armor in the hangar right before she’d launched to come get him and Allura. 

Keith just raised an eyebrow, not asking.

“You know if there’s something you’re worried about, you’re always free to ask for help. We are all in this together, after all.” 

“…I know.” He kept the food as a distraction, bland as it was, for a minute, then - “…Thanks.” 

Coran was making a real effort, and had been since everything had started. It was one of the worst parts, really; Coran was more like what he’d always been told family should be than just about anybody he’d lived with as a kid, and more consistently there than his father had been before he’d disappeared, but it didn’t help being almost terrified of talking to the older man. He didn’t think Coran would react as violently badly as Allura’d been indicating, but that didn’t mean he expected Coran to react _well_. 

“You know, I should thank you - and all the others really - for everything you’ve done. You lot really are almost all we’ve got now, and… well, I know Allura’s said as much, but it really is good to hear life back in the Castle again. This place was always meant for something like a family, whether there was even species in common or not.” 

Coran put a hand on his shoulder, and he paused still, a lump in his throat. 

“Didn’t mean to upset you. I just wanted you to know that you do have a home here, and… well, I’m here for all of you, no matter _what_. At least, as much as I can be when I’m trying to do the work of an entire crew, of course.” 

Keith gave a quiet nod. “I…” He needed a moment, a couple slower breaths. “…Thank you. I mean it.” 

And as afraid as he was, as much as he was pretty sure he couldn’t get the words out to Coran if he tried, he wanted to believe that ‘no matter what’.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title is from Be My Hero by October Project. (...which is probably on the obscure side of my collection.)
> 
> (Lance eating his foot is probably among the closer moments to anything ship-ish I'm doing with this, but man, I had to do it.)
> 
> Back in the saddle after getting distracted by other projects + work and work training out of town! I AM DETERMINED TO CATCH UP TO THE END OF SEASON 2 BEFORE SEASON 3 DROPS. Or at least get damn close.


	26. It's in my eyes, half our lives - with my fears burning in the pyre

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith isn't necessarily great at the waiting and preparing before the trial the Blades demand, but does get a distraction from restlessness courtesy of Antok.
> 
> And afterwards, Kolivan has a brief attempt at things Keith 'should have known all along' that puts more in perspective than Kolivan realizes.

During the flight in, Shiro was still trying to carefully edge around boundaries; Keith had to keep most of his focus on the course in, but around and before Shiro’s attempts at bringing back ‘I want you to lead if anything happens to me’, he’d caught a couple moments of Shiro pulling away from a reflex to just let the whole back and forth open link happen, little flickers of worry about overstepping boundaries. 

As much as he tried to focus, Shiro’d gone more subdued and worried, with guilt pangs, afterwards, and Keith was pretty sure he’d gotten louder than he’d meant to with exactly how much almost losing Shiro the last time it’d come up had hurt. 

Shiro was still trying to avoid anything that might even look like prying, and Keith wasn’t sure if he appreciated the respect for boundaries or wanted to shake Shiro to stop pulling away from him like that. 

After he’d agreed to the trials, the apparent second motioned for him towards a side door, “To prepare”. Shiro moved to follow; Antok stepped into his path, along with two of the other Blades, a wall of black armor and masks between them. 

Shiro glared up, arms folded, but gave a moment for explanation. 

“He is undertaking our trials. You may be present as a.” The big Galra paused, as if there was a concept that didn’t belong there at all. “Guest, and you may be his commanding officer as a Paladin, but you hold no authority here.” 

Shiro held a staredown with the Blade towering over him for nearly a half minutes, before he looked away, leaning just enough to look between them to Keith. 

“Be careful.” 

Keith nodded, and the Blade made a small cut-off noise that Keith wasn’t sure how to interpret. 

Shiro stepped back. The Blade returned to leading Keith out of the room.

The corridors were narrow and dark; the dim lighting was so consistent that it had to be a Galra thing. They didn’t seem too uncomfortable in bright light, or he hadn’t seen any of them show signs of discomfort with it, but it really did seem like they preferred dim and dark lighting.

Probably nocturnal. 

And while he didn’t seem to have gotten enough of that side of the family, he didn’t have as much trouble in the dark as others, and tried not to think about the elevator incident or other times other people had sworn they didn’t see something he did, especially in the dark. It wasn’t easy to keep track of hallways and bearings, and for the moment, he wasn’t even focusing on it very well, either. 

He was led to a small chamber deeper in the compound; it was small, spare, and might have been some kind of living quarters, although probably not any kind of long term. The main room had little more than a large padded bench and a table. 

"You have a quintent to prepare yourself."

The Blade second stepped out, and the door closed. 

He sat down on the bench, staring at the far wall; he wasn't sure what was meant by 'prepare', and they didn't seem inclined to explain anything, either. He tried focusing and asking Red what she might've known; after all, she'd apparently had vague recognition of the knife before, even if she'd been refusing explanation or withholding it for as long as he had been avoiding it.

There wasn't much more of a clue from the lion past what had already been shared - it was Galra, it was partly ceremonial, she hadn't known much of anything else about it before and had no idea if anything from ten thousand years ago would even be relevant now. It'd been a long time, a great deal had changed, and even if things had been passed down through the ages, there probably would've been pressure to change and adapt as the Empire grew and changed. That was assuming the Blade of Marmora as it was now traced back to whatever the lion had glimpsed before, and wasn't an attempt at re-creating something lost from symbols and fragments.

He knew from the renfaires and bits of history how well that usually worked; it tended to mean there was only superficial similarities and some ideas in common.

So no luck with Red, even if the lion was watchfully supportive.

He had no idea what he'd just gotten into. He couldn't think of doing anything differently - he hadn't gone his entire life carrying this to walk away; he was so used to being the alien, the unknown, the giant blank trying to adapt without actually fitting anywhere or matching anything, with nothing more than a knife that had only ever meant 'no, you don't belong here' to go by. 

His human blood family after his father had vanished had been among the worst he'd had to deal with; that old memory, ground-in wariness, was almost having a triumphant pointing fit at the harsh reaction he'd gotten. Blood couldn't be trusted, family was at least as bad as strangers if not worse, it was no different here.

At the same time, he wanted to hang onto some sliver that Ulaz's example was more normal, that they had just come in unannounced, that paranoid caution was a survival tactic anymore and maybe he could get through whatever was going on.

It was a trial; could they have survived this long, afforded the excess, of going to the trouble of trials and tests and then not respecting the results?

He wasn't giving 'failure' as an option; he'd fought Zarkon one (two) on one and lived, he wasn't going to die to some kind of initiation. 

It didn't help that he wasn't sure what had happened with Shiro; Shiro had been pulling away and he knew he'd thought it seemed like what he got from Shiro was Shiro worrying about overstepping bounds, and he hadn't had a chance to check if Shiro remembered the knife, but...

He wasn't sure if Shiro's uncertainty had just been Shiro's memory going messy and him freezing up and answering too-honestly, or if there was something else going on. He didn't _want_ to doubt or worry about his relationship with Shiro, Shiro was the one person that had always been there and never willingly pulled away or refused to help-

But that was something where they had no way of knowing that the Blades _wouldn't_ kill him, and they had him on the ground where they could've easily done it and it would've been hard for Shiro to intervene in time if they had decided to go that route instead of arguing.

His internal rabbit-chasing was interrupted a few hours later by one of the Blades - the armor made it impossible to tell them apart where there wasn't a distinctive trait like the second's tail - opening the door to wordlessly leave a tray of food, closing it again behind them.

It mostly seemed like some kind of fish, if a little heavier in texture than what he was used to. He honestly wasn’t sure besides that it was meat, and while it was cooked, it was about as plain as everything else there was right now.

He wasn’t sure if the preparation for whatever trial not involving fasting adjusted his expectations of what he was getting into better, or worse. 

After he’d eaten he got more of a look around; there was some kind of a shower attached to the small room, and with zero idea what he was supposed to be doing, it seemed like as good an idea as any. The entire setup was downright monastic, and he was bad enough at ‘sit and meditate’ when there was some kind of direction what the goal was, much less being left in a room with no explanation. 

It didn’t take up near enough of the time he was expected to wait, and he settled on the bench to sleep.

The door to the room he’d been given opened to one of the Blade; the second was hard to mistake.

“You don’t know what you’re walking into.” The door closed behind him, leaving them alone in the dim lighting with the Galra blocking the door. “You shouldn’t be so quick to throw your life away.” 

“I’m not leaving without answers.” He glared up; somehow it was registering even more how _huge_ full-blooded Galra were now that he was dealing with them outside of being preoccupied with combat - and this one seemed unusually big even for that, easily Sendak’s size. The Blade’s tone was even, but Keith was pretty sure it was an intimidation attempt anyway. 

“You won’t be leaving at all.” There was a faint edge of frustration, the three-eyed helm visibly staring down at him. “You are not invincible, and you should be more cautious.” 

“I’m not afraid of you.” He dug his fingers into the bench he was sitting on, not budging. 

“You should be.”

One moment, the Blade was standing in the door on the other side of the room, tail starting to noticeably tick behind him; the next, there was a clawed gauntlet on Keith’s shoulder, yanking him off the bench. He managed to land a solid kick into the Galra’s side, using the throw for his own momentum, but the Blade second had his footing and balance solid, and Keith may as well have hit a metal wall for all the good it did; all he really accomplished was twisting so that he ended up on his back instead of pinned on his stomach again. Keith had a knee firmly in his stomach and a hand engulfing his throat and collarbone. The Galra had more than enough of an advantage in weight and strength to keep him there, his attempts at breaking their grip accomplishing next to nothing against the black armor. 

“ _You can die_.” The Blade leaned in, pinning one of Keith’s arms with his free hand, the three white lights looming over. “Fear is what keeps you alive, and this war is already littered with countless corpses who died _uselessly_.” There was the pricking of claws on the side of his neck on the last word, the material on the gloves giving just enough leeway to feel the points. 

“I’ve already faced Zarkon. I’m not dead yet.” It had never been outside of Red, but it was true - and honestly he didn’t think the distinction mattered when it came to surviving Zarkon.

There was a short, quiet, rattling rumble. “You cannot _properly_ wield that blade. I’m not sure why our leader is indulging this farce.”

He’d already caught that he wasn’t to be told anything about what the trial entailed, and it suddenly clicked - there was something more to the knife. He knew he’d caught the rune on it glowing sometimes when he held it. A lot of Galra-made things were keyed to only work for Galra, and the knife apparently worked on something more magic-oriented and even more likely to be picky.

There was something to do with the knife, but he looked human enough that they didn’t think it would work for him - might not have even realized he _was_ Galra at all. 

He managed a brief, weak laugh; he certainly wasn’t going to say anything. At this point, with the reception they’d gotten in the face of everything they were up against, he was looking forward to the chance to throw the whole thing in their faces when it worked. 

Spite was a wonderful motivator.

The second made a frustrated noise that had a louder growl to it, making no effort to be gentle or mind his weight about getting up. Keith was left curling inward as the breath went out of him by the knee driven momentarily into his diaphragm. He caught something grumble-growled about pointless waste as the Blade left the room, door closing behind him.

He was almost tempted to see if they’d bothered actually locking the door to the room he was supposed to stay in, or if it was just left on basic ‘only Galra’ permissions, but he didn’t want to tip his hand early. 

The silence continued for the near-day he was given; food was brought by again, and he spent half of it sleeping, half of it trying to figure out what they expected him to be doing while he was waiting. 

Eventually, two of the others came to get him, ordering him to leave behind his paladin armor and his bayard - but he was allowed to keep the knife.

It was a nerve-wracking walk away from the small room he’d been waiting in; there wasn’t much under the Paladin armor but a thin set of underclothes, light padding that wasn’t really meant to be worn on its own. It wasn’t really any more or less protection than his normal clothes would’ve been, probably a little more, but it still felt unusually vulnerable, particularly when he was flanked on either side by armored Galra who had a good few feet of height on him and swords with a decently longer reach, as well as no real idea of any escape routes beyond a vague sense of which direction Red was outside the base. 

He got checked over and manhandled with very little explanation by one of them that seemed already frustrated, who then stalked off grumbling about adjustments, ‘what are they even thinking’, and ‘this whole thing is a bad joke’. 

It made him all the more determined to get past it; spite remained an incredible motivator, even when the ‘adjustments’ they were grumbling about turned out to be getting some kind of light armor to fit him.

Any attempts he made at questions were ignored, from “do people die often in this?” to more innocuous attempts like “What kind of meat was that earlier?”.

The only answer he got about what he was going into was a curt ‘yes’ when he finally asked if it was normal to not know what the trial was before going into it. 

At least he wasn’t alone on that. 

 

***********************************************

The Blade at least were quick to bring his Paladin armor after the trial; his legs gave out again not long after he’d been accepted, Shiro moving to catch his arm and support him. One of the floor panels shifted to bring up benches, and Shiro steered him to one to sit; there were clawed hands deactivating part of the Blade armor and helping him fumble with the latches as the injury and exhaustion of the trials caught up. Shiro stayed next to him, a hand on his shoulder to help him stay steady, occasionally helping where he could and wincing as he got the battered vambraces and breastplate off. He didn’t really want to take the time to check how much of a mess of bruises, scrapes, cuts, and faint energy burns he was. There was some conversation between the leader and Shiro while he was stripping out of armor that he didn’t catch, something about accompanying to ‘your ship’. 

He also caught, when Shiro was more focused on him, some kind of stray comment from Antok to Kolivan about 'this is why you don't bluff' that Kolivan accepted with little more than a tired half-shrug.

Another of the hooded Blades pushed a narrow canteen into his hands; whatever was in it was cold, faintly sweet, and at least seemed to make the world wobble less. He was still reeling a little, working on wrapping his head around the confirmation; it was almost surreal that there wasn’t the cold pit of nausea and shame that he’d felt from the dreams Red had been letting through anymore. He’d been bracing for it, but instead there was an odd sense of relief and lifted weights.

He didn’t fight like a Galra, he was a Galra, or at least half of one, and it meant more than just being something of Zarkon’s.

When he focused on the memory of the distinctly not human reflection in his dreams, he wasn’t seeing Sendak and Zarkon in his dream-self’s face anymore, he was seeing Ulaz and Kolivan, and there was a thin mental purr of approval and pride from Red.

It was at least easy enough to get back into his own armor as he found his feet again, Shiro still hovering close. Kolivan seemed to be noting that thoughtfully. 

It was hard to tell exactly where Galra were looking when they weren’t turning their head, but he was still pretty sure he was getting watched sidelong on the way to the hangar; there was commotion as the Blades were dashing around to deal with the damage Red had done while he’d been unconscious. 

“You really know nothing.” 

He made a quiet affirmative noise. 

“And Zarkon threw out anything that wouldn’t serve his purposes long ago.” The leader rumbled with a slow shake of his head. “Hunt to live. Fight to protect your own. Endure to survive. Know that all else that lives will do the same.” There were bits that he was pretty sure the odd psychic autotranslate was kludging to closest equivalent, just enough of a parallel concept for the attempt but not enough for it to entirely work; archaicisms and bits of old turns of phrase where parts of the meaning had been lost and some of it didn’t really work well in languages he was used to. “Better yourself, as your strength is the survival of your Reshet, but do not do so at their expense, as their strength is your survival.” It wasn’t a word he’d ever heard before, and the whole thing was definitely archaic and translating oddly; Red had provided bits of concepts, but it didn’t kludge into any language he knew well - Pride? Oathbinding? Pack? Brothers in Arms? Team? 

Alfor had called Zarkon part of his as he was dying, even if it was being spit like a curse.

The intent was clear enough at least; he nodded, trying not to lapse punch-drunkenly into old book and movie quotes - ‘for the wolf is the strength of the pack, and the pack is the strength of the wolf’. He’d wanted to be like Mowgli for a while as a kid, before other bullying and harassment ruined any comparison to wolves for him.

Kolivan shifted, just enough for a clear pointed look between him and the sword now slung across his back, then to Shiro nearby.

Placing the others even or ahead of himself. 

There was an odd watchful intensity from Red, a tug on the memory of the desert and indistinct dreams of fire and claws. Red hadn’t been enshrined where it belonged; something had happened that put Red far from where she should’ve been, and he got the sense that the incident with the pod hadn’t been the first time Red had gone to ridiculous lengths trying to protect her Paladin. When she’d called him, it hadn’t been a pull to the stars where Sendak’s cruiser was; it was a pull to pay attention to the energy of the lions in general, to draw him to the Blue Lion, because he had no chance of reaching Red alone…

And he couldn’t reach Blue until he found someone Blue would accept. 

His predecessor had probably done something stupid trying to aid Lance’s predecessor, and Red had stayed in a Galra cruiser waiting for years, sending messages he couldn’t understand well enough at the time to try and herd him into finding a new Blue Paladin. It had been about them as a group from the beginning, before he’d even had a clue there was a group. He’d been right about having some destiny he couldn’t comprehend when he’d started getting the odd dreams and the pull - and had been right to suspect, from that one odd painting of a sky far-future to the person who’d made it, that going there with four other people to match five indistinct tiny figures would be what finally started everything happening.

“I’ll try.” 

He caught Shiro smiling out of the corner of his eye as they reached the Red Lion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title is from The Come Up by Shaman's Harvest -  
>  _Once I could see I was my own enemy_  
>  My demons pushin' me to the dark  
> It's in my eyes, half our lives  
> With my fears burning in the pyre  
> ..I can't fight alone anymore
> 
> The last part of this was one of the first things I wrote, along with the intro and part of the next chapter.
> 
> GRANTED THE NEXT CHAPTER HAS BEEN THROUGH SEVERAL EDITS FROM WHAT IT WAS ORIGINALLY.


	27. Am I lost or am I found - And are you with me now

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Now that he's back on the ship, Keith starts to find out who did and didn't know -
> 
> For worse and for better. 
> 
> And Shiro finds a moment in the short break to check on Keith after the ordeal and fuss at him.

Shiro stayed close on the way back, hovering close enough that he probably could catch if Keith’s coordination on the controls slipped; Red was louder in his head than usual even, nudging through the link to prop him up further while he was in the cockpit and keep him steady. She was still testy, even if _some_ of the injury was forgiven for the shift in Keith’s attitude towards his own heritage. 

Only some.

His nerves were still frazzled, but there at least was something different in this; between having someone hostile digging in his head and trying to undermine and, now that he was more lucid and out of the trial, having his own fears thrown up as obstacles to face and get past. 

The cockpit was mostly quiet, the two Blades other muted ‘something is here’ presences, while Shiro was at least not periodically flinching back like he had been, a quiet nudge beside him of pride and worry with a more intentional attempt at reassurance; he wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, didn’t think any less of Keith still. 

It helped, even though the natural defenses of the Blade’s hideout meant he couldn’t just relax into it and _rest_ like he wanted to while he had to pilot. He still worried how Shiro was taking it, considering he’d already triggered a freeze once, but that not only got noticed, it got a small response that was fully aware of his body language when he was truly angry being the same as a full blooded Galra - and that apparently after the initial shock Shiro had decided it was kind of cute scaled down like that, like a puffed out kitten.

He wasn’t sure if that was flattering or a moment of watching his dignity drain away.

The other three managed attention, courtesy, and dignity when they arrived. 

That decorum lasted through the introductions of their new allies and five steps away after Kolivan’s warning of how little time they had left. 

Then the other three descended on Keith in a noisy mass of “HOLY SHIT ARE YOU OKAY WHAT HAPPENED” questions that all ran together, with enough worry and still-lingering panic to pick up on it outside of the lions. Hunk actually started to pick him up, noticed his wince when it jarred about five or six different non-disabling injuries, and put him back down. Pidge was actually the first to step back, as his dazed and overloaded blank expression apparently sank in; Lance backed up a second after, trying to play off like he hadn’t just been in the middle of “We thought you were _dying_ ”. 

Kolivan and Shiro just stepped aside, Kolivan having a moment of watching them with a distant look of consternation, as if he were, once again, unsure of everything. Shiro was fine with giving them the moment, while Allura was mostly distracted giving Kolivan dodgy looks. 

After that, Coran waded in and reminded them that the Bridge was a better place to get everyone caught up on everything so they could start planning, and the trio pulled decorum back together long enough to salute. The three of them hurried ahead with the mice, managing to outpace the rest of the gathering not far out of the hangar. 

Red was viciously smug and not answering. 

The sudden relative quiet was a small mercy, even if it meant he was walking up with Shiro, Kolivan, Allura, and Coran.

Allura’s eyes had flicked to the sword now at his back a few times, finally turning to a questioning look as they walked; Coran, at least, was acting as though this were perfectly natural when Kolivan spoke, although that raised all kinds of uncomfortable questions itself where he wasn’t sure how to react to the likely answers yet.

“Your Paladin passed our initiation trials - and acquitted himself as well as any pureblooded Galra with our full training. You must be proud to count him as your own.” It was hard to take that as anything but a compliment; he was smaller, more fragile, and while he’d gotten much better, he was adapting training not meant for this kind of use still. 

“Keith is very …skilled….” She trailed off, faltering on the words, glancing back over her shoulder; Shiro had moved to walk beside her, opposite Coran, letting Keith trail a little behind, so that Shiro was mostly between him and the Altaeans. Allura had a questioning look, like she was sure she hadn’t heard right. “Pureblooded?”

He tensed, his stomach knotting, suddenly all the more aware of the Galra sword on his back and the feeling he should have claws; he noticed Coran tensing as well, and that Kolivan’s expression had gone a little too still and schooled, the Blade apparently realizing she hadn’t known. 

“Half”, Keith said simply. “Or something like that. I think.” He’d just come to some kind of terms with it enough to almost forget what he’d been afraid of, but that was all coming flooding back in Allura’s stiff posture. 

She blinked over her shoulder, almost missing a step, as though it wasn’t fully sinking in. “That can’t be right, your armor has very advanced biometric scanners and would have noticed such a hybrid biology long ago - Coran would… have….” Her gaze moved to fixate on Coran, who visibly flinched, side-stepping away. “Coran?”

“I didn’t know he didn’t know, and there’s always been much more important things to worry about.” Coran shrugged, still playing it off naturally, although he was a little more nervous on that; Allura glared at him tiredly, but straightened her shoulders and continued on, choosing to ignore them both. 

Coran had known from the beginning, as soon as he’d put on his armor; the sensors in it _were_ that detailed. Coran had known from the beginning and a hundred little things suddenly clicked, from the synthetic food that was varied by species mostly, Coran’s relative lack of reaction to him losing his temper enough to lapse into Galra body language back with Lance, Coran’s occasional vague fishing - 

Immediately after the fight with Zarkon and the first thing Coran had done in apology was slip in with what had to be the synthetic meant for Galra. 

“You’ve suffered much at the Empire’s hands.” Kolivan’s voice was quiet, cautious but oddly apologetic; there was a great deal of history implied in that one phrase.

“Yes, I have.” Her demeanor was trying to be diplomatic, but was still icy and curt.

“I will not deny that our people have much to answer for, more than any apology could cover. It is my hope that we may put an end to Zarkon’s tyranny, for all of our sakes.” 

“That is our goal.” 

*****************

When they reached the bridge, there were a few confused glances at Allura’s sudden increased stiffness, but there were no further comments from the Blades, Allura, Shiro, or Coran about his heritage; the exhaustion from the trial started to catch up early in Kolivan, Allura, and Shiro starting to hash out basics of what everyone involved knew, the others occasionally chiming in. 

The occasional dodgy glares from Allura were starting to wear on him, and had earned a few confused, uncomfortable looks from the others.

He couldn’t be surprised that she’d taken the news poorly after the initial shock wore off; he knew her history, knew where it came from. She still was struggling with Zarkon and anyone else who’d been working with him at the time destroying everything she’d ever loved and treating her as little more than bait and a target; suddenly finding out someone else close to her was Galra, like the causes of all of it and like they were still fighting and tracking endless atrocities from, when the ones she’d had the most reason to drop guard and believe she could trust in the past had been the ones who’d done and were still doing the worst…

He was pretty sure that her reactions to him being limited to sideways glares and an icier demeanor was her putting off the reactions she wanted to have because she was aware of being in a diplomatic situation she couldn’t afford to throw, and prioritizing the chance at striking a real blow against Zarkon over her personal feelings on the matter. 

He’d just lost a friend and been demoted to ‘functional necessary piece to reach goals’. 

It didn’t look like the others had any clear idea what was wrong, but that was a matter of time.

He was half dozing himself through parts of the planning meeting; he probably should have bowed out, but didn’t want to miss something this important. After a point, it came out that not only had he been through a literal gauntlet, but most of the others hadn’t really slept while they’d been in the Blade’s headquarters, and Shiro didn’t look like he’d taken much advantage of any offered time to rest, either. 

There was an agreement to adjourn “briefly” - long enough for their team to get some rest and Kolivan to bring his second, Antok, on board and make sure everything was in order for the two of them to leave. Keith was perfectly happy to wander out and get some distance on the situation with Allura for a while. Shiro stared after him, the worry a thing he could pick up on - and he was pretty sure it was intentional on Shiro’s part - but Shiro looked back and stayed there, attention on Allura and Kolivan, apparently having some other last business of his own. Pidge and Hunk dispersed around him, heading for the kitchens.

He didn’t get far in the upper hallways before Lance caught him, darting in the door behind him with a conspiratorial look around to make sure the area was empty. 

“Hey, Keith!” 

“…What.” Lance was a little too animated in the nervous way that meant he was up to something. Lance had been the one who’d seen him work a Galra console, lapse into very Galra bristling and growling after the worst incident of hitting a nerve, seen him navigate in the dark when Lance couldn’t see, who knew Zarkon’d been in his head and been connected for one of those incidents. 

“Listen, I was thinking. About that thing you said about the thing with our training and everybody being in each other’s heads, and I’m pretty sure that I got a better look at it back when we did manage to pull Voltron away from Zarkon, and…” He rubbed the back of his head, shifting weight from foot to foot a few times while Keith continued to stare at him like he’d lost his mind. “Look, you’re the one who was talking about weird dreams and psychic shit even before we found Blue, Coran makes no sense when I ask him and I think Allura might deck me if I asked her how the weird mind-reading crap worked and she hits hard…”

“Yeah, she probably would.” It was also highly unlikely that Lance would resist the temptation to slip some kind of innuendo in there to earn it. 

Lance shot him a glare. “I’m trying to ask you for help, you asshole.” 

Keith gestured for him to go on, and then folded his arms to wait.

“Can you help me figure out how that works? I mean, it kinda seems like getting better with that might be a life or death thing, that last time all I could really do was sort-of mentally scream at Zarkon and try to keep hold on everybody and I’ve still got no idea what I did. It probably wasn’t much help.” Lance wasn’t quite facing him, but was looking up, staying where he could easily either come closer or turn around and leave. 

Lance had been loud and clear during that but was still managing to second-guess it and doubt his own perceptions of it. 

“…I’m pretty sure I know why you don’t get it very well, and you’re not going to like to hear it.”

Lance flagged, drooping, and made his own ‘go on’ gesture, even if he looked like a cat held over water for it. “Can’t be any worse than half of what you come up with.”

“You’re insecure. Really insecure. It’s pretty loud. I think Zarkon can hear it from half a galaxy away whenever you’re on the relay. And a lot of what’s on the relay pick up on isn’t obvious, it’s pretty subtle when it’s not something screaming loud like Shiro’s nightmares. So you’re so sure you’re getting things wrong that when you do pick up on something, you probably throw it out rather than think your instinct might’ve been right, or you overthink it into oblivion.”

There was a barely-visible increase in the droop and he gave Keith a sour look. “Okay, so what am I supposed to do with that? I’m not just gonna blurt out whatever comes into my head until someone pitches me out an airlock.”

The door was wide open and it was right there; for a moment there was a flicker of a sharper smirk as Keith saw the opening - ‘I thought you already were’ - and Lance’s eyes narrowed in more of a glare as he saw the wheels turning and _knew_ Keith saw the opening. 

But Lance was actually asking for help, on something Zarkon COULD exploit against them, and he’d probably given Shiro enough new gray hairs for a year. He could already hear the aggrieved mix of groan and sigh that usually came before Shiro breaking the two of them up, nevermind what Kolivan and Red had said on the way back - Lance was one of his people, as obnoxious and pain in the ass as he could be, and they were dependent on each other; Lance was the one Red had been trying to get him to find for a year and a half. He wanted to keep what little he’d learned from Kolivan, and he didn’t want to disappoint the Blade on something like that this soon after getting accepted, either. Even if part of him wanted to keep up the antagonism just to convince Shiro to stop trying to prepare him to take over, there were more important things. The smile passed, and he pondered how even to get around Lance’s self-sabotage - to get him to do the right kind of not thinking.

“I need to get you distracted until you’re not thinking, but focused on someone else; so you’re not overthinking it to fill in other crap and you’re not second-guessing yourself.” It was one of those cases where getting emotion ahead of reason would probably do good. “You need to be completely running on what you actually know or feel about someone, rather than what you think you know about them…and I think I have an idea how to get that.”

Lance recoiled, cringing toward the door. “…Keith, no offense, but if you want in my pants just say so, so we can get the let-down over with - I don’t think of you that way at ALL.” 

“Lance, even if I were into guys, I think I’d go for Zarkon first. More personality and better looking.” He hadn’t been thinking for it, and for a half beat, he almost regretted falling back into antagonistic habits. 

But the reflexive recoil actually made a pretty good opening, which tipped Keith’s reactions from a cringe into the beginnings of a wolfish smirk, something that only seemed to fuel Lance’s offended pause and transition into snapping back. “The Hell is wrong with you?! I have plenty of personality and a rock has more ‘personality’ than that creepy old -“ It devolved into Spanish expletives briefly - “He might have more personality than you, though.” 

“You still jealous? I might’ve had better things to do but I know what my odds were back at the Garrison. How many times did you get shot down for not being me?” It wasn’t even things he cared about enough to needle personally, but he knew from the relay and things Lance had said in arguments where Lance’s sore spots were, and that they were too easy to hit; all he needed to do was play to what insecurities had turned him into in Lance’s mind. 

“What do I even have to be jealous of - at least I actually APPRECIATE when someone’s interested in me!” Lance was making sharp, wide gestures at him, still gaping in angry confusion.

“Yeah, I bet it is valuable for how rarely it happens.” He tilted his head. “That’s been the problem all along right? You can’t stand that I’ve always been better at everything than you.” Even if he was pretty sure that half the things he’d done better at would even out if Lance would just learn to focus and stop worrying about not doing well enough, or were things where Lance’s skills didn’t even overlap with his own and it was a fish trying to compete at climbing trees; Lance did fine when he was too preoccupied to be insecure and was good at things Keith wasn’t even sure how to start on. Half of Keith’s own frustration with the other Paladin was Lance’s seeming need to lash sideways to compensate, and push him out when Lance didn’t treat anyone else like that.

Lance snarled, hands balling into fists. “Like HELL you are, you fucking fake of a dropout!”

Keith puffed up taller with a smug grin; it really was too easy. “So what were your scores all through training again?”

“You were - and here I -“ He made a few incoherent angry noises; Keith just smiled wider, showing a few more teeth. “At least I know how to relate to people so they don’t ditch me first chance they get, you-” There were some incoherent frustrated noises and some fragment of angry Spanish expletives that didn’t make it past whatever translated things - “Son of a Galra!”

He raised a hand, some of the smile fading back further than just dropping the act; the first part of that had stung, but that’d been what he’d been bracing and hoping for out of all of this - Lance getting angry enough to strike at things he wouldn’t know about without the link. “Okay that’s enough. You got it.” Lance paused, caught short of lashing out again in confusion. “Hell, you got things I was working pretty hard to keep _off_ the relay.” He walked past Lance to walk out, clapping the other pilot on the shoulder; somehow the rattled nerves were blending into all of the other exhaustion from the trial. 

Lance turned around as he reached the door, hand still in the air, the blistering, wounded anger already draining out into something confused with a tinge of awed sympathy. “You were baiting so I would -” there was a beat, and actual worried pity. “That’s what you’re really afraid of? That’s…Kinda sad.” Another beat. “…WAIT HOW MUCH OF THAT-“

The door closed behind Keith. It opened again before he’d made it three steps, Lance launching at his back to catch his shoulder; when Keith sidestepped that, Lance continued past, turning to stop in front of him. 

“HOW MUCH OF THAT WAS ACCURATE?! I CAN’T HAVE - THOSE WEREN’T LITERAL WERE - I GOT SOMETHING WRONG RIGHT?!” Lance’s voice found octaves it hadn’t used in years.

He thought it over. “The Spanish was just incoherent swearing, right?”

“Yeah?” 

“Then that part was wrong.” 

Lance made a few weak gestures, mouth working with little more than incoherent noises. Keith stepped around him, walking to the elevator. He almost made it before Lance found words again. “HOW?!” 

Another foot closer to the elevator and Lance turned on one heel, hands going dramatically. “How does that even - oh bleeding purple quiznak, THAT’S why you could work Galra computers?! That’s been bugging me for _months_ since Pidge pointed it out with Shiro - and back on the Balmera you just - and the elevator - how long have you - you didn’t start getting really weird about it until - how didn’t _you_ know before that?!”

He gave Lance a long, deadpan look. “Denial. I knew I wasn’t all human, just not what the other part was, and…I didn't want to believe the clues.” It was the truth, and Lance’s confusion and frustration at not figuring it out earlier was loud; Keith hadn’t been the only one to stare straight at all of the evidence, consider it, put it down, and continue on while refusing to put the pieces together. He hadn’t even thought twice about working the console to space the drones and himself on Sendak’s ship, but he had noticed the console on the Balmera not reacting when Lance tried to mash buttons, he’d just written it off as Lance pushing the wrong ones - and he was quickly distracted from thinking too hard about what Pidge had said in the central terminal by the Druid, which led immediately to fighting Zarkon.

“How long have you known you weren’t human?!” Lance hadn’t started moving to follow again.

“There’s always been a lot of pretty obvious weird things. I learned to try to hide it pretty fast where I could.” He shrugged, tapping the call button; he could hear Lance scrambling to catch up. “I figured out it was being not human when I was twelve or so.”

Lance had just gotten a hand on his shoulder when the doors opened to Coran, who glanced between them with an eyebrow raised. “Good evening, boys. Just ducked out to check a couple of computer relays myself.” Coran looked between them. “Are you two alright?”

“Fine.” Keith, at least, was feeling a little better, even if he was still a battered mess. 

“Everything’s okay, I’m fine,”, Lance squinted sideways at Keith, “Keith was just…helping me figure out some of the weird psychic crap.”

Corran gave both of them a very dubious look, with a more focused narrow moment of studying Keith, then considered it, and went back to his usual cheer, apparently concluding that it wasn’t something that needed help. “Well, good to see you two getting along finally!”

He stepped out of the lift around them, continuing on with a bright hum as they got in the lift to leave.

“How have they not noticed?” Lance gestured widely back towards where Coran had disappeared.

“Coran knew all along. He’s seen the readouts from the biometric scanners in our armor. Allura didn’t know until an hour or so ago.” The lift dinged a few floors; Lance still had a hand on his shoulder. 

“So that really is why you’ve been weird lately about the Galra, and why all the creepy nightmares about turning into one?” Lance’s hands were still moving, in what Keith could only describe as the gestural equivalent of a loading bar.

“Sort of? Zarkon yanked on it while we were fighting, but I didn’t want to believe him. I wasn’t sure until I saw Ulaz’s sword.”

Lance finally stopped, standing straighter and putting his hands in his pockets. “How do you not know if one of your parents is Galra? It’s not like they can do that chameleon thing Allura does.”

The lift chimed and the doors opened. Lance followed close on his heels.

“I don’t know? It’s not like I could ask my parents. I don’t even know if I’m half or if it’s further back.” He was still faintly bitter about them being gone, although at this point, he also wasn’t sure what had been going on anymore. There would probably always be some lingering disconnect about his father - they got along when the man was there, but he’d been gone more than he was there, and made zero arrangements for Keith during absences or for his disappearance; he’d never known why his mother wasn’t there, but if she was closely connected to the Blade at all, visibly not all human, or Galra herself, she couldn’t exactly have hung around - and the Blade knives didn’t seem like something they let go of lightly; whoever he’d inherited it from had probably left it because they knew they were going to die. 

There was something in the illusions the armor for the trial had induced that nagged at that anyway, and he suspected he had a clue that it might be close enough for it to be a miracle he could even pass for normal human. _Your mother will be here soon._

“Okay. Creepy nightmares were literal, you’re Galra.” Lance shrugged, arms folded, repeating it as if he were getting used to the change in direction things had taken. They made it a few more steps before he shrank in, looking away. “Ssoooo… did you…”

He trailed off; Keith looked back.

“Never mind, it’s stupid.”

“Lance, I’ve just been through a Galra initiation trial. I’m too tired for this. What is it.”

Lance actually edged backward a little, away from Keith. 

“I’m not going to bite your head off.” It was a stupid thing to say when it partly depended on what Lance did, but things Lance was afraid of were probably safer than what he said out loud most of the time. 

“That’s not it.”

Keith stared, stopped, trying to figure out what the Hell was going on.

Red nudged in a reminder of what he’d just been doing and saying.

“…Is it what I said when I was baiting?”

Lance flinched, then straightened trying to cover it. 

Keith sighed, frustrated and feeling like he should have known better even if he wasn’t sure what else would have worked to trick Lance out of overthinking. “Was that really what you think I think?”

“Nnn…Ye…maybe?” Lance finally stopped shrinking, making a frustrated gesture at him. “I don’t know, it’s not like you make it easy to tell!”

He was starting to wonder if the trial was easier. It did mean he didn’t have any of the energy for any normal level of guard; just tired, worn down, and half wanting to give up and hope that Allura was the only person he’d be losing out of this - give up and hope that some of the signs were right and he finally had people that wouldn’t turn on him or leave suddenly. “Honestly, I was surprised you fell for it.” 

Lance gave him a suspicious, sideways look. 

“Lance, I hated dealing with people at the Garrison. I just wanted to get off Earth to figure out what I _was_ and to help Shiro. Iverson drove me up the wall, I hated how I only meant anything to them when they could use me to make themselves look good, I didn’t _care_ about the score rankings, and most of the people who hit on me creeped me out.” Almost all, really - the few that didn’t were ones where he only figured out they’d been flirting after they’d given up and backed off. “There’s plenty you’re better at than me, and the only things that drive me up the wall about you are the competitive bullshit, and you - sniping at me constantly trying to shove me out when you don’t treat anyone else like that.”

“…do you really mean that?”

“Yes, Lance. I mean it.”

Lance shifted awkwardly. Keith wasn’t sure if it was progress or not. 

“So … uh.” More awkward. “Why were you so wound up about going and bugging them, specifically?” 

Lance may as well have just said ‘look a distracting thing’, but Keith was both too tired and way too unsure how to deal with people to pin him down on that right now. Using the relay next time they were in the lions to hit him over the head with ‘I DON’T HATE YOU’ seemed like it might work better than talking, anyway. “Because I’ve had one of their knives all my life.” He reached up to tap the hilt of the sword.

“You’re telling me that is that knife you’ve been carrying around?” Lance was squinting at it suspiciously.

“We’re bonded to giant alien lion god machines. Is a living knife turning into a sword really that weird?”

“…No, I guess not.’

He turned to his door, walking in; Lance leaned in, still following. “…Geez, have you done ANYTHING with this place? I can barely tell anybody lives here.”

Keith glared tiredly back, and Lance raised his hands in mock surrender, still standing in the doorway.

“Okay, okay, not like there’s a lot of options, I guess.” Lance finally stepped in, letting the door close. 

Keith sat down heavily on the bench, letting out a slow, tired, heavy breath, and sat his helmet down next to him, wincing a little as the movement tugged on the wound on his shoulder.

“…Are…you okay there?” Lance leaned in, squinting. “You … really do look like Hell.” 

“Initiation trial. There was a gauntlet. I kind of got the shit beaten out of me.” He shrugged with a half-smile; he’d earned his victory there. 

Lance raised an eyebrow, leaning back, giving his bravado a very dubious look. “Keith, buddy, my man. We did catch Red going berserk back there. That alone says it was a little more than ‘getting the shit beaten out of you’.” 

Keith made a vaguely smug noncommital noise, working on getting more of the armor off; Lance made a small sputtering noise and moved in to grab catches and help after he winced again trying to get everything off the injured shoulder. “They didn’t want anything to do with us at first, and thought I must’ve stolen the knife. When I wouldn’t go away and insisted on getting answers, Kolivan finally basically bet everything on the trial, and told me it’d kill me if I failed. I think he expected that to get me to give up.” 

“Hoboy. Hook line and sinker for you there.” Lance rolled his eyes. 

“Can you get the first aid kit? Third cabinet down across from the bed, by the door.” He didn’t really feel like getting up to get it, and Lance was actually being mostly tolerable. 

“Sure thing.” It meant Lance had his back to Keith until after Keith had peeled off the underlayer from the armor; Lance turned around and jumped, almost juggling the box. “Holy _quiznak_ \- The Hell happened?!”

“Knowledge or Death.” Viciously smug, but also exhausted and more aware now of all of the myriad bruises, cuts, and faint burns. “And fighting a gauntlet of their warriors until I figured out how to get out of it without giving up.” 

“By almost dying?!” Lance set the first aid kit down, curling over it to open it, and Keith suddenly suspected that if he tried to reach over to get into the box and do things himself, Lance would swat his hand. 

“No. That was some kind of face-your-fears nightmare from the weird armor they had for it.” He rested his hands on the bench. “That’s apparently when Red had enough; they had to wake me up out of it so I could call her off, but… the knife woke up and that’s what decided the trial.” It was oddly freeing to actually talk to someone besides Shiro and not be hiding as much, but he wasn’t feeling _that_ close that he wanted to go into the details of the nightmares yet - it’d probably end up coming out sooner or later, anyway, but after he’d had time to sort his head. 

Lance was muttering to himself, but apparently did know his way around the Altaean first aid setup, even though some of the devices in it weren’t anything they had back at the Garrison; he dug out a couple bottles and set to cleaning the cuts, leaving Keith with the discovery that wound disinfenctants still meant cold liquid and a lot of stinging. “So what you’re saying is, that they were trying to show you the door, but you were so stubborn that they tried to scare you off with some kind of crazy Galra initiation rite that would probably kill you.” He paused checking over the deeper cut on Keith’s shoulder with a wince. “And even though it almost _did_ , you passing it was enough for them to decide to throw in with us on everything and adopt you or something, even though they’d just been trying to kill you.”

“Yep.” 

Lance paused in tending the injuries to just give him a dull stare. “And that all makes perfect sense to you.” He left that hanging in the air, still staring, drily unimpressed for a long minute. “…You really did find your people. You’re all batshit insane.”

Keith ended up half-dozing at some point, still sitting up, while Lance was working with some of the Altaean devices to seal the smaller cuts and heal them over, a questioning noise just getting a distracted comment about Coran showing him how it all worked once. After a while, the door opened, startling Keith sitting straighter; Shiro was leaning in the door, blinking as he took in Lance trying to get some kind of Altaean sealant over the wound on Keith’s shoulder. Lance stared up, as if he’d just been caught out at something and wasn’t sure what to do.

Shiro smiled, expression softening, leaning more easily on the door for a moment before he came in. “I just wanted to check up on you after all of that.” He gestured back down the hall. “Kolivan went to pick up Antok; they’re both going to be joining us on the Castle for the rest of this.” 

Lance glanced between them, and at the kit, suddenly awkward and without much else useful to do either. He packed up the supplies in a hurry, leaving the box sitting there before sliding out with a small “I’ll…just be going now”. 

After he left, Shiro shook his head, and sat down next to Keith. “You have no idea how good it is to see you two not fighting for once.” 

Keith made a quiet acknowledging noise. “I guess I haven’t made keeping the team together easy sometimes.”

Shiro put a hand on his good shoulder, carefully, metal and material cool on Keith’s skin. “Not as bad as you think. I know you’re not really used to people, but you’ve been getting better.” 

Another quiet, more noncommittal acknowledging noise. Red’s attention sparked, nudging back the reminder of when Lance had realized Zarkon had gotten into his head, Hunk tricking him into helping with the engine as a pretense, and Pidge staying with him right after they were rescued. 

She also was perfectly happy to again emphasize Kolivan’s brief attempt at advice - something she apparently remembered as old and familiar traditions - and leashing it to the old law of the jungle, his own childhood voice getting recited back to him as an echo of the new and still unfamiliar awkwardly-translated Galra fragments. _Now this is the law of the jungle, as old and as true as the sky, and the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die. As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk, the law runneth forward and back; for the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack._

He sent back a tired reminder that he’d also spent years having the early ‘wolf’ attachment turned into something to terrorize him over, but that didn’t seem to impress the lion, who was certain that the other children behind that weren’t worth caring about enough to listen to. 

He gave up, and just had one mostly sarcastic response to her using his own seven-year-old voice to recite that to him - _so what does that mean about Zarkon?_

 _The wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die._

“Heavy conversation?” 

He startled out of his daze; Shiro was looking at him, bemused, and he realized he’d at least mouthed something almost out loud. “Not really. Red’s dredging up old stuff from when I was a little kid since I don’t know the Galran version well enough for it to not garble.” 

“Hence the recitation?” 

He shrank down with a flinch, suddenly self-conscious. Shiro shifted where his hand was so that he was putting an arm around him over his shoulders, albeit trying to not put pressure on the large gash. “Don’t worry, Mowgli, I don’t have that one photo of yours here to show anyone.” 

Keith pulled a face with a groan; Shiro might not have anything of his anymore for a copy of the old photo of Keith as a child, in a Halloween costume that was little more than a loincloth, up a tree chewing angrily on a shoe while a foster parent and social worker were both trying to coax him down, but he was pretty sure there might be a copy somewhere on his phone, and he couldn’t let Shiro know it existed. 

Shiro’s tone softened out of the gentle tease. “Besides, you never mentioned that sober, but the way you talked about it drunk seemed like it’d been a big deal to you as a kid once; it’s not a bad thing if Red’s giving that back.” 

“I don’t know if it’s giving it back when it’s using it for a kludge for some Galra philosophy because I don’t speak Galra very well and the concepts don’t translate to English.” He listed over to lean on Shiro.

“It makes sense, I guess - that’d be really different evolutionary ancestry going pretty far back, so human languages wouldn’t have a concept for that kind of social instinct that wasn’t based in animal behavior alone.” 

“And enough social instinct for a civilization has to come from somewhere.” Theoretical xenobiology was a subject Keith had a complicated relationship with - trying to fritter around the edges despite biology and evolutionary science not being strong points because it was something with a lot of personal implications, while terrified of and avoiding most of the people heavily invested in it because he didn’t want to end up a specimen in some kind of research. Still, he did remember the part about sapience, civilization, and that it would be at least incredibly difficult for a species that didn’t have social ancestors to develop language complicated enough for abstract concepts and share space enough to share information for coherent development of more advanced technology, nevermind that spaceflight almost demanded close quarters for long periods. 

Galra definitely had carnivore ancestry, and social predators tended to live in small but incredibly close-knit and cooperative groups. 

There was silence long enough for him to start dozing again almost.

“…Listen, Keith.”

He startled out of the doze with a “hrmph?”; Shiro had gone pensive, and actually sounded almost guilty.

“I’m sorry if I’ve upset you. I just wanted to make sure you knew that - as much as I might worry about things going wrong, I’m not going to leave if I have any say in the matter, alright?” He gave Keith’s shoulder a gentle squeeze.

“I.” His voice caught in his throat, and he wasn’t even sure what he was trying to say anyway; he curled in against Shiro, face pressed into the material of the vest, trying to shove away the images from the nightmare in the trial - and of Shiro half-dead on that desolate alien world they’d been stranded on - 

“It’s okay. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.” 

Something cracked, and curling up against turned into quiet sobbing and clinging, the mechanical hand gentle on his back and carefully skirting the mess of bruises and minor injuries. Somewhere after a while, it trailed off into sleep, Shiro’s soothing murmuring all blurring together. 

He wasn’t sure how long he was asleep, but he woke up actually on the bed, draped over and clinging to Shiro like a particularly determined octopus; there were at least three blankets draped over him that he was struggling to get loose of feebly.

Shiro woke up muzzily when he moved, looking down at him. “I think I would’ve needed a crowbar to leave even after you fell asleep. Hunk stopped by to check up a couple times; he dropped off some kind of tea or something the Blades brought with them, and what he’s pretty sure are brownies. He swears there’s no scaultrite in them. They’re not that bad, especially for him scraping together whatever he could find that he suspects is food; kind of mint tasting.” 

Keith snorted, giving up on navigating the blankets and just sitting up; one slid off, leaving the other two still over his head. 

“I’m going to go get a shower and get my armor, and you should too. I don’t think Kolivan was kidding about our deadlines, and we’ll need to go finalize some kind of plan.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am entirely assuming there was a gap between contact with Kolivan and the proper planning session that led to the final plan because nobody's in armor when they arrive, Kolivan is the only one who came with them at the end of Blade of Marmora, and then in the beginning of Belly of the Weblum finishing up the plan, they're all in armor and Antok's there.
> 
> And no, Hunk didn't sleep.
> 
> (Also the entire section starting from Allura finding out through things with Lance has existed as long as this fic has and it feels like I've accomplished something by catching up.)
> 
> Chapter title is from Are You With Me by Sixx AM (and not the first time I've used it either).


	28. These are the times we find out who we really are

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith catches up to the rest of the team for what he thinks is the big reveal. Then after their various missions and the reborn robeast, the team has their own echo of "whatever, we're sleeping here"; and Keith tries to ask Kolivan and Antok about something, with unexpected input from Coran.

Once he’d gotten a shower, he wandered to the kitchen before getting his armor. This somehow meant ending up in the kitchen at the same time as Lance. They’d gone about their respective business in silence for most of it, mostly jointly concluding there was too much going on for anything; there was a mission looming, and no telling how long they’d be split up as a group.

Lance was the one who broke that. “…So what’s it like, being part-Galra?”

Lance being morbidly curious remained easier to deal with than Lance when he was ego-posing. “I dunno. In some ways there’s not a lot different for knowing? I’m still me. I’d still be me even if I still didn’t know. A lot of it’s been there my whole life.” He was picking over what was left of the goo, too sore and preoccupied for much while he had a break; he stared into the last dregs in the bottom of the bowl as he continued. “At least I know now why I’ve always been bad at being a ‘normal human being’.” 

He looked up at a flicker of movement; Lance was gesturing for his attention, looking somewhere behind him with a very awkward expression of terrified confusion, and it looked like he might’ve been more and more frantically waving for at least half of that explanation. He followed Lance’s gestures and gaze, turning around to look, and found Pidge, standing in the doorway, head cocked at an angle, blinking widely and with an expression that was probably the best human equivalent to a computer processing error.

She held up one hand, tapping the air three times. “…Okay you two are getting along, Keith is talking about not being human, and I’m either still dreaming or I’ve walked into the Twilight Zone, so I’m going to turn around, walk back out that door, and come back in here to see if I’m back in reality.”

She turned on one heel and walked out. Keith set down his bowl and pulled out his phone. He was on the emergency alerts information keying past them for further records when she walked back in.

“OKAY I should no longer be in the Twilight Zone and Keith why are you bringing up your medical records what did I walk in on.”

He turned around and held the phone out to her. She held it carefully away from her, scrolling through it with her eyebrows going up past the frames of her glasses. 

“…Okay…physiology and medical science are not my strong suits but…”

Hunk appeared around the doorway, leaning over her shoulder and squinting at it, eyes going wide with a low whistle. “Whose records are these?”

Pidge twisted to look up and back at him and pointed wordlessly at Keith.

Hunk’s gaze slowly moved from the phone up to Keith with another wide, confused and thoughtful blink and an odd sort of freeze.

“I’m part Galra,” he finally just blurted out, then stayed still; he wanted to believe they wouldn’t react badly, but it was hard not to have that panic looming that they might. 

There were a few jumbled half-formed questions as they talked over each other for a moment, making it impossible to tell who was asking what; Lance looked at the ceiling, folding his hands together to twiddle his thumbs and whistling. 

“He’s the first one you told?!” It was almost in unison, and more vehement and apparently upsetting than any of the previous near-questions.

“No he wasn’t. I was.” Keith turned again; Shiro was slipping around both Pidge and Hunk, completely matter of fact and nonplussed by everything. 

“Well, at least something makes sense today,” Hunk concluded, finally stepping around Pidge to follow Shiro to the food dispensers.

“I can’t have done that well at keeping it off the relay. I know Lance picked up on it and just ignored it until I pushed.” He pushed at what very little was left in his bowl, debating if it was enough to bother with.

“…Well okay yeah, you were kind of bad at it, and the nightmares were really loud, but…” Pidge made a few more confused gestures, his phone still in her hand. “For a while I thought Zarkon had done something to mess with you, and tried not to think about it too hard. I try not to think about a lot of things like that. I didn’t really think it meant anything until I caught Ryner making some kind of weird amused ‘huh’ noise like she’d just seen something interesting and I checked the lock you’d just opened back on Olkarion.”

“I had Coran show me all the outputs on the food dispenser and tried them until I figured out which one you’d been complaining about. Coran kinda panicked when I asked him why he kept ambushing you with the Galra synthetic, and had me promise not to say anything about it, but I guess if the Galra’s out of the bag now, it’s not a big deal, right?” Hunk was almost horrifyingly casual about it, and after the initial shock, a tiny part of Keith’s brain dredged up the memory of Hunk in the shack, pulling out Pidge’s journal as if it were nothing. “Although I did kinda talk to Pidge about it after I saw she’d accessed your biometric records when we left Olkarion.” Pidge froze with a small sputter, looking to Keith with the panic of someone who’d just been caught out; Hunk continued as if it hadn’t happened, sitting down with his bowl. “By the way, no, there really isn’t a way to overlay _anything_ that’ll work to fool the Galra bio-signature species locks.” 

Keith stared at both of them; he wanted to have a reaction, but it felt like the inside of his head had turned into a mess of spinning hamster wheels that all the hamsters had fallen off of. “So the only people who hadn’t figured it out where Allura and Lance.”

He was going on weeks now of near-constant low level panic about how everyone would react if they found out, and most of them had already known.

Red definitely had input on this, but it was mostly the wordless psychic equivalent of hysterical laughter to the point of forgetting to breathe. 

“Looking back on it, I just stopped thinking about it that hard after a while,” Lance interjected, waving his spoon. “You _really_ suck at hiding things.”

Shiro made a choked off noise trying not to laugh. Keith shot him a short, sulking glare, sending Red a frustrated and more confrontational query of if _she’d_ known everyone else knew and just let him panic like that; the conversation being a flurry of ideas, emotion, and vague wordless impressions meant that the sense of the lion laughing didn’t even let up with the admission that she hadn’t apparently checked with the others about it because she’d been sure from the beginning that this was about how it would work out. 

“So is it different now after whatever Zarkon did and the whole initiation thing? Like, did that knife of yours turning into a sword mean some kind of weird Galra awakening thing?” Hunk was entirely too upbeat and casual about it, and for a minute, Keith just stared at him, trying to process both the near-argument with his lion and not being sure how to respond to any of this.

Red did add the sense that he wouldn’t have accepted assurance that the others wouldn’t react badly without proof, which would’ve required telling them, which would’ve led right back to his panic-spirals about it. 

The worst part was that he knew she wasn’t wrong.

“I mean if the sword’s a big magic thing, and you had to do something special to get to wake up, but it didn’t activate before, then that’d mean you had to like… figure out how to get the right kind of weird psychic output or find its wavelength or get a breakthrough for something to change, so it’s kind of like a reflection of you now, right?” Hunk was continuing on, happily speculating as if it were no more alarming or unusual than the normal functions of the Castle.

Pidge ducked her head, setting Keith’s phone down next to him now that there’d been no sign he was going to snap about them having gotten into his armor’s biometric data, and slunk around him to the dispensers to get her own food. 

Keith’s train of thought was finding about as much purchase to move as a greased cat on ice, which only seemed to amuse Red more.

Shiro apparently took Keith’s dumbfounded silence as a reason to take over for him. “I’m not sure it’d be that kind of a change; it seemed like what they were testing in the trial had more to do with clarity and control, being Galra just made it possible.” 

“You sure? I mean, if it was just something mental then it should’ve been possible to get it to turn into a sword without knowing what it was before, shouldn’t it?” Hunk thought hard, then sighed. “I’ve gotta ask Coran to teach me more about the whole magic thing.”

Pidge sat down with her bowl, rubbing her temples with one hand, and Keith heard a tiny mutter of “Clarke’s third law” repeated like a mantra.

Keith opened his mouth to that, and got shot one of her most focused glares of promised murder if his usual response actually happened out loud. 

He shut his mouth, and awkwardly put his phone back away in his pocket. 

She opted for a different tack on the magic debate. “Honestly, the part I’m curious about is how. I would’ve expected an Altaean hybrid if anything, since that whole adaptive shapeshifting ability would hypothetically have better odds of overcoming genetic incompatibilities, but Galra have nothing of the sort and don’t even seem like they’d classify phylogenically anywhere near terrestrial primates.” 

Keith buried his head in his hands; Shiro looked over with an eyebrow raised, checking in faint concern, and Keith just waved one hand dismissing it. 

The sudden fascination with debates about his heritage and how it worked was _annoying_ , but it was better than what he’d spent so much time terrified of after the confrontation with Zarkon. 

Hunk looked up from his bowl, motioning with his spoon. “Well, they’re also kinda weird and all over the place. Maybe it worked for the same reason why Galra with scales are the same species as Galra with fur and all?” 

Pidge leaned back, looking at the ceiling. “Maybe. There’s probably some kind of records around here if we can figure out how to read them.” 

Keith almost startled at a hand patting his shoulder when Shiro was on the other side of the table; he looked up to find Lance giving him a serious look of long-suffering sympathy.

Shiro, on the other hand, seemed unusually happy with everything as the table was taken over by the other two having an increasingly convoluted debate speculating about Galra genetics. 

************

By the time everything was settled, between the various missions, the monster, the aftermath, and some kind of hashed-out agreement to go back to visit the Balmerans when they weren’t risking leading another Robeast there or Zarkon wiping out their new allies, they’d gotten out of armor and ended up settling on the lounge room as ‘closer than the other rooms’ and ‘almost quiet’. 

Almost, as Shiro got pulled away to finish sorting out preparations on their end, and decided to be merciful and let everyone else stay by the large couch. 

After Shiro left the room, Keith considered moving. 

And decided against it. However good he was at pushing through when there was something to do, however prone he was not always getting enough sleep, he did have limits, and he didn’t have any pressing reason to move. Hunk worked perfectly well as something to rest against. Lance was on Hunk’s other side and still seemed to be in that awkward area of not being sure what to do with Keith, but not letting go of having gotten suddenly aware of Keith’s twitch about people leaving, either. 

Besides, Pidge was half-draped over him using him as a pillow, and he didn’t feel like fighting her to get up. 

“You know, I can’t-,” Hunk started, then paused. “No, I can believe you spaced yourself out of the lion. I’d like to have a hard time believing it, but I should’ve seen that one coming.” 

“It worked,” was all the defense Keith attempted. He considered prodding Hunk about some of the conversation that went on in front of some kind of unknown maybe-hostile, but it was more effort for an argument that would get everyone else’s attention than he felt like having right now, and besides, Zarkon already knew, he’d been opening doors and messing with shit on their ships, it wasn’t _that_ hard to come by in terms of intel to slip. 

Nobody else commented, and he wasn’t sure if it was shared tired resignation, or shared too-tired-for-all-the-shit-that-just-happened. 

It was hard to tell who fell asleep first, but Keith woke up to the sound of Pidge and Hunk both making very quiet shushing sounds. He was still leaning on Hunk on the couch, but everything else was off; there wasn’t really weight on his chest but someone was there, and what had to be Pidge was still sitting on one of his legs but wasn’t draped over using him as a pillow anymore. 

He cracked an eyelid open and looked down. Lance was turning confused, still awkwardly leaning over with an ear to his chest.

“…What. Are you doing.” 

Lance stumbled back with a flail and an awkward yell. Pidge broke down snickering, and Hunk was looking away in badly feigned innocence. 

And Shiro’d gotten back at some point, on the other side of Hunk, still sprawled out flat on the couch and grinning, utterly unrepentant. 

Keith wasn’t sure what had just happened, but there was apparently something potentially worth revenge on most of the team; he settled on Lance as the first person to try to glare into answers.

Lance fidgeted, looking away. “You were _purring_. I mean, sort of, something kinda close? It was really quiet and way more rattly and clicky than a cat, but it was definitely there.”

Shiro was laughing quietly. He was going to end up with his pillow booby-trapped soon. 

“I didn’t know Galra did that!” Hunk was grinning, and had given up on faked innocence. 

Keith slumped into a sulk, sliding down between Hunk’s shoulder and the back of the couch after one last glare at Lance.

“Hey, don’t look at me like that - you weren’t supposed to wake up like that, and besides, Pidge was the one who noticed!” His demonstrative pointing was interrupted by Pidge throwing her wadded up jacket at his head; it flopped down to drape over his shoulder.

“And it’s cute.” Hunk nudged his back with an elbow.

“I am not cute.”

“Yes you are.” 

Lance motioned to Shiro as if Shiro’s addition settled it; it might not just be Shiro’s pillow. 

“Hey will you do it again if we scratch behind your ears?” Hunk shifted with the question, just short of propping Keith out of hiding behind his arm. Keith rolled his eyes, squirming a little to sit back up with an attempt at getting his leg back from Pidge. 

“No. I will not.” 

Hunk’s smile turned scheming, and he had a hand raised already.

“Not when he’s sulking like this,” Shiro added. Definitely not just his pillow.

Hunk actually drooped in disappointment, and Pidge was stifling laughter behind her hand. 

There wasn’t really any winning, and while he wouldn’t admit it out loud, he wasn’t sure he wanted to win; he learned around Hunk to fix Shiro with a sharp look. He didn’t think there’d been any reason since Kerberos for Shiro to’ve noticed that, and the way Shiro’d teased him back in the Garrison it would’ve come up if it’d happened here. “I thought you didn’t remember much.” 

“Sometimes things come back. Also it’s happened a couple of the times you’ve fallen asleep on me here.” Shiro raised a hand airily. 

Or Shiro could’ve just not said anything as part and parcel of giving his nerves about his possible heritage space.

Keith huffed, and settled back, giving up on getting his leg away from Pidge at first. After a couple minutes of Pidge still half-laughing and Hunk trying to see if he could sneak a hand over to scratch behind Keith’s ears, Shiro mentioned food, and they wandered off, scattering some for the rest of the trip to Olkarion. 

Red was purring contentedly in the back of his mind.

***********

He still wasn’t sure how to approach the two leaders of the Blade. The cold demeanor they’d been met with was gone; they were both still quiet, subdued, and standoffish, but to an extent that made sense with who and what they were. It was an awkward place somewhere between finding family he hadn’t known he had, family that was less miserable to deal with than the human side, and authority figures where he knew there was a distinct protocol and chain of command but had no actual idea how it worked. 

Or even how he fit into it; he’d passed an initiation, but he was a Paladin of Voltron first and foremost, something they definitely seemed to acknowledge and factor in.

It led to awkward moments hanging back trying to figure out if he even should be approaching, what questions were okay to ask and what would be overstepping boundaries.

Antok noticed, the mask shifting just enough to visibly be taking note. “You’re allowed to speak.”

He walked into the room; it was hard not to feel small next to them. “There’s an old simulation on the observation deck. I don’t know where or what it is, but there’s definitely Galra structures as part of it. I was wondering if you might know.”

The two of them shared a look, considering. 

“Well, there’s not much else but to wait for arrival.” 

And after a beat he realized that meant he was leading out, as the only one that knew their way around the castle. 

The lights still weren’t set to come up automatically on the upper floors; the simulation with the unfamiliar gas giant surrounded by stations and space borne structures was still what it seemed to default to whenever he walked in.

The two Blades watched the scenery for a few minutes quietly.

“Well. That is definitely partly Galra construction,” Antok finally observed.

“Archaic as well.” Kolivan nodded. 

Neither of them sounded entirely certain what to make of it.

The door opened, and Coran stayed near the wall quietly; Kolivan glanced back, but was unconcerned. 

Antok folded his arms, tail ticking an even rhythm behind him. “The planet itself looks like Velst, but there’s at least five different races’ structures and designs involved in this.”

“That’s because it is Velst - or is what Velst used to be.” Coran pushed off the wall, walking into the room to stand by the others. “In the early days of the alliances, Velst was a Galran border system; the colonies were nearly leveled in a conflict. Our other allied races all pitched in on the rebuilding, and it became a part of a large spread of territory that was allied with only nominal ownership by any one race. At one point it was a major population center and hub for trade and travel, with an entire network of stations around it.” Coran motioned at the various structures that surrounded the planet. “It was also one of the first to fall when Zarkon turned, being so close to purely Galra territory.”

Red had an odd, pensive rumble in his head of familiarity; which bits of planetoids and outlying debris were stable enough to land on, who had larger concentrations of their population where.

Antok turned his attention from Coran back to the observation deck’s projection. “I don’t think you would want to see it now.” 

“Likely not.” Coran shook his head. “I’m the one who keeps leaving it set to this - it’s oddly comforting.”

“You realize there’s little to nothing left of this.” Kolivan nodded to the projection. 

“Well, yes. But it happened. It was real and it existed. So, it’s not impossible. It’s how things should be, and we can bring it back.”

“It’s good to have someone who remembers.” 

Coran gave Kolivan a questioning look. 

“We have tried to preserve as much as we can of what our people have lost, but…it’s a monumental task. The longer this drags on, the more we’ve been unable to hold.”

Antok nodded, faintly grudgingly, picking up where Kolivan left off. “In our own ways we are all products of Zarkon’s reign. There will be much needing rebuilt and remade when his empire finally falls, and few that know what the result should even look like.” 

“Well, everything has to start somewhere.” Coran walked over to the curving inset couch, stepping over the edge to slide into it, arms draped over the back; most of his attention seemed to be on the simulation, the myriad different small ships coming and going from the outposts and stations around the gas giant. 

There was a very pensive silence that went on; Keith still had a hard time not finding it tragic. Any one of the orbiting stations or floating cities would’ve been bigger than any city on Earth; just this one planet and what had happened to it was more deaths than if his entire homeworld ceased to exist. 

It was still beautiful, a massive sprawl of different architectures built to blend into each other, a work of art where the simulation brought back a living echo of the past era; like walking into a crumbling ruin but being able to see the art, people, and life as if it’d only been a day ago. 

The two Blades were equally quiet, watching it; he both did and didn’t want to ask what it had become, now that he had a name for the planet and signs that at least Antok had been there relatively recently. He only had the abstraction of seeing what the rest of the Empire was like to compare to what had once existed; they knew exactly what Zarkon had made of it, and didn’t seem to have much of anything for what it’d once been before this. 

And Coran, who’d been there when it’d been thriving, who was somehow managing to cling onto what was lost as a symbol of what could be.

There was one of the patrols he’d seen watching the simulation before, three cruisers all in a similar scale range to the Castle; Altaean, Galra, and what he now was pretty sure was an Olkari ship, design sensibilities similar to what he’d seen of their capitol. It was an almost frightening moment of perspective, the amount of history Coran had, how much the Blades had been fighting, and here he was, one of the few people they were all pinning everything on to tear down the Empire so that something like this might be possible again. 

It seemed like it should’ve been a confidence boost - Red was certainly nudging in the back of his head, sure they would succeed, bonfire-warm - but for once he was mostly just managing to feel incredibly small. 

Kolivan was the one who finally broke the silence, his attention turning to Coran. “…You’ve been taking our presence much better than the Princess.”

“Well, why wouldn’t I? You’ve been risking your lives the same as anyone else, and I’ve seen enough proof for myself that you’re on the same side.” Coran was incredibly matter-of-fact about it, as if the whole thing were simple and just getting overcomplicated by everyone else. 

“After everything you’ve been through, you likely have as much license as she does for suspicion,” Antok said; the mask made it even harder to tell where he was looking, but he had shifted where he could see basically everyone in the room easily. 

“Meh. Maybe.” Coran waved a hand, a loose, circular gesture. “You know, the lions were as much Galra work as Altaean, even if we did have other help as well, and there were Galra who worked on this castle up until everything fell apart. I spent a good part of my life with friends and co-workers who were Galra, back when it wasn’t a thing anyone would think twice about. Zarkon and his closer followers killed a number of them when he turned on everyone; they had second thoughts about breaking the old alliances and turning on friends and loved ones.” He hadn’t looked up from the simulation once in any of that. “Zarkon spilled plenty of blood into that rift between him and the both of us, really. Just, most of the Galra she’d known were his inner circle and Zarkon himself, and as close as he’d been…”

Antok lowered his head, and Kolivan looked back to the simulation. For a moment, there was a pensive weight to the silence in the room; Keith still had a little too much of a sketchy understanding of how pervasive that kind of hurt and betrayal could be, how much of it wasn’t even ‘revenge’ or spreading blame, it was expecting it to happen again and pre-emptive anger. 

He was small, and increasingly out of place in the room.

Antok broke it with wry bitterness. “After ten thousand years, that may be the most unreal part of it all - Zarkon having been different, once.” 

Coran cut off something like a bitter laugh himself. “Oh, I have to wonder what the man I first met would think if he could’ve seen the future to know what he’d become.” 

“Well, you have the benefit of all of us there.” 

Keith thought about backing out the door, but caught both Antok and Kolivan shift when he moved a foot back to turn; Coran looked up, catching their movement, and Keith sheepishly stepped over to the other side of the curved couch, settling in and trying to be unobtrusive. 

“You knew him well?” Kolivan was tentative; it wasn’t hard to tell how sensitive a subject the entire issue was.

“Well, besides spending half my life as support crew for the Paladins?” Coran glanced sideways over at the Galra, with a motion to the entire castle around them. “He was practically a part of Alfor’s family. They all were, really.” 

“Then this can’t be easy for you.” It was oddly cautious, half-comforting and half-gauging.

“I got through the initial shock ten thousand years ago.” Coran folded his arms, staring off at the simulation again. “Now there’s not much left to do but clean up the mess, and I’ll be damned if I’ll give him what he wants.” 

He got two questioning noises in unison from the two Blades.

“He wants us miserable and afraid of him, because that means he’s winning.” A wolfish grin spread across his face, and there was a brief motion and a nod to Keith, getting his attention. “I can’t make his Empire go away so easily, but I can start with what I do have control over - so every time he’s trying to be a terror and act like he’s invulnerable, I just remember how many _hundreds_ of idiotic things I’ve seen him do, and that he’s the man Allura’s mother once threw in a lake.” 

It was a moment of all of Coran’s antics and jokes taking on a different light, along with all the time he spent looking after all of them and showing up to fuss when things were going wrong; all a massive act of defiance. 

“Threw him in a lake?” Antok had perked up, focused on Coran with renewed interest. “Oh, you can’t just say something like that and leave it at that.” 

Coran was entirely too gleeful to oblige. “Actually it happened a few times, with several bodies of water and anything else safe enough - although that wasn’t just her, you know how that sort of thing goes; sometimes it’d turn into little wars that went on across the Castle until some mission interrupted it, he lost more than half of them. As for one of the _best_ incidents, I can do better than just telling stories.” 

He tapped his wrist, bringing up a small computer screen and had a second, larger screen generated by the room a second later; another minute of quiet ‘now where is it…’ muttering, and there was a video, starting somewhere mid-recording.

It was somewhere sunny, with the white and silver curves of Altaean architecture in the background, greenery leading down to a nearby lakeshore; broad plants covered the surface, pointed wide leaves and curving ropy floating fronds. There were three people in frame easily, and a sleeve occasionally visible to one side. One of them was an alien that wasn’t even a familiar species to Keith, but that Red recognized as one of the old Paladins; the other two were Zarkon and Alfor, both out of armor and lightly dressed, younger, Zarkon lacking the scars and with more normal yellow eyes. 

It didn’t look like any of them were completely sober, either. 

“-And after that last stunt of yours and how spectacularly badly it went, I’m starting to think that next time I should just pick you both up and take you back to the Castle before you get yourselves hurt.” 

Alfor started to straighten at Zarkon’s jab, raising a hand in mock offense, when the sleeve to the side of the screen shifted. “Oh really? _Both_ of us?”

Zarkon froze, mouth shut, eyes going wide. It was the near universal reaction of just about anything realizing it may have attracted the attention of a bigger predator and trying to be passed over. “Ah, not what I’d _meant_ , I-“

“Oh no, you already said it.” The entirety of her forearm and hand came visible as she stood up, and Zarkon actually shrank down a little. 

“Please accept my sincerest apologies, your majesty?” It was offered very tentatively. 

The other Paladin shuffled to the side, away from him and half out of the frame as she walked forward, the back of her dress covering part of the camera; Alfor also slid to the side from where he was sitting.

Keith had been well acquainted with the unnatural strength of Altaean royalty thanks to Allura. The Altaean queen effortlessly picking Zarkon up as if he weren’t easily twice her size was not anything new; the ungainly, indignant squawk from Zarkon as he made a half-hearted attempt at getting loose wasn’t something he’d expected.

She heaved him into the lake as if he weighed nothing; after a bit of floundering, he managed to right himself, bits of water plants hanging off of him everywhere.

There was an indignant huff that lasted until he looked up to find her still standing on the edge of the lake. Zarkon shrank back into the water with an expression that Keith could only compare to a puppy that’d just gotten caught shredding the house. Then, he looked to Alfor.

Alfor shifted back, raising his hands with a shake of his head. “Oh no, I enjoy breathing.”

The queen didn’t move from the shore. “Now, I believe you were just saying something _clever_ …”

Coran cut the video just as Zarkon was almost visibly composing himself with resignation; as much as there was some kind of vicious amusement, he was still more tense on the couch than Keith remembered seeing him since Allura’d been taken. Before anyone could say anything, he was motioning to where the screen had been.

“That’s what he wants everyone to forget. That he’s not invulnerable and untouchable; he’s a fallible man, and more of an idiot now than he’s ever been.” 

It wasn’t a completely distant subject anymore; Red had shown bits and pieces, fragments of old memories, impressions of what things had been like and where they’d broken. It was hard to tell where to start or even if he should start when it was, for once, noticeable that Coran was sometimes doing just as much of a focused attempt at shoving things away to keep moving as Allura did, and he was pretty sure he wasn’t in a position to approach it without getting deflected. Coran wasn’t paying attention to him, but he caught faint movement from the corner of his eye, where Antok and Kolivan were standing.

Once Kolivan had his attention, the Galra tipped his head toward the door. Keith nodded.

“I think I left my armor by the hangar; I should go check on that.” 

Coran startled out of his moment of staring off, but Keith was already halfway out the door by the time he looked up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I will find somewhere to get back to the Balmera properly; the timing here was awful + I have a good bit to go through yet. (And next chapter will be Olkarion!) 
> 
>  
> 
> Chapter title is from These Are The Times by Styx - 
> 
>  
> 
> _I know these are the times we find out who we really are_  
>  This will be when a true friend stands at your side  
> Someone like me who wants to believe  
> In the days of high time and innocence  
> 


	29. Did You Ever Dream We'd Miss The Mornings In The Sun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (There are relatively minor Season 3 spoilers in this chapter!) Keith figures out a way to communicate with the mice. While they have downtime on Olkarion, Keith checks in on Ralar, then goes out to see the city and ends up spending some time with La Sai and Hunk.
> 
> And Ryner finally gets to talk about some of what she remembers.

They weren’t incredibly far out from Olkarion; he’d been pacing the halls of the Castle, mostly in the less-used areas. 

It was a large ship, one clearly meant to have a crew; he wasn’t sure if he wanted to one day see that addressed or if he’d be disappointed to lose the ability to actually get some quiet and solitude in the large areas that didn’t have people in them.

Or at least, what was almost quiet and solitude, as he caught a tiny flicker of colored fur.

“You can come out, I know you’re there.” He sat down, waiting and watching the direction he’d seen the flash of fuzz intently.

Plachu and Chulatt emerged a foot or two away, Chulatt low to the ground and sheepish, Plachu pausing to look around the hallway as if trying to act like there was nothing suspicious about tailing him.

“Not buying that for a second, Satan.”

Plachu sat up, sticking his tongue out at Keith. Chulatt rolled her eyes. 

“So Allura’s that paranoid about me.” It should’ve been angrier, but he understood too much of her reaction for more than beaten-down resignation. 

The mice looked at each other; there was some awkward shifting, and then both of them were squeaking at him with occasional tiny emphatic hand gestures. Unfortunately whatever they were trying to convey was not among the concepts that got across well with dumb-show and charades, leaving him unsure what was even going on by the time they stopped and looked at him hopefully.

“…Okay, no, I don’t understand a word you just said.”

Plachu gave a heavy squeak of frustration and facepalmed. 

“This would be a lot easier if you guys could type or write or something.” 

The mice thought for a moment; there was a flurry of squeaking between them, then they looked up at him, and Chulatt mimed out writing something out and handing it to Plachu, who squinted and scratched his head.

“…Yeah, I know, you guys wouldn’t know how to write in English or Japanese or any other Earth language, and I can’t read Altaean unless-“ He thought, poking Red; the lion’s attention drug out of half-dozing, and conveyed a vague ‘worth a shot/why not’. “Actually that might work, as long as you guys keep it simple and don’t use anything too complicated or specific that wouldn’t translate - Red can give me the gist of it.” 

The mice listened, then both nodded enthusiastically. 

He messed with the wristband he’d managed to figure out how to detach from the armor, bringing up one of the Altaean light-screen computer panels, and held it to re-angle it down where they could easily reach it. 

Plachu ran over first, using both paws on the Altaean keyboard with a surprising amount of speed, as if he’d had some practice; the most likely culprit Keith could think of for that would be Coran. Once there were a few full sentences, Red was able to give at least the concepts, the way she had before when Coran had left notes.

It was partly Allura being paranoid, but not because she’d ordered them to; they’d thought that keeping track of Keith so they could say for sure what he’d been doing would do more to help her suspicions.

“…So you’re keeping watch on me so that you can tell her for sure that I’m not doing anything to turn on anybody.”

They both nodded. 

“Are all of you in on this one?”

A nod, and Chulatt took the keyboard; there was something that at first didn’t translate correctly that Red went back and adjusted proper names to attach them to known people - Chuchule was staying close to Kolivan and Antok, who had noticed but had seemed to not particularly care beyond a little irritation. Plachu nudged in, adding that apparently Antok had taken to narrating what he was doing so whichever of them was nearby could hear occasionally, with some sarcastic commentary thrown in.

And then Chulatt took the keyboard back, with a question of if he was angry at Allura, because they’d expected it but he didn’t seem to be.

He almost asked if they were going to be taking this back to her, but … at this point he wasn’t sure it mattered if they did. He sighed. “…Sometimes I want to be, but I can’t.” 

Both of them looked up, tilting their heads at him.

He pulled his knees up to his chest, resting his chin on one knee. “I know why she hates me. I have the same problem with … almost everyone.” 

Both mice shared a long-suffering and skeptical look before Plachu turned to the keyboard, correcting that no, he did not hate everyone, they had figured that out pretty fast, even if he was a mess with no social skills. 

“Thanks.” He rolled his eyes. “Look, I mean it. I’m-“ He trailed off, suddenly having a hard time getting the words out.

Shiro had been right. He hated admitting it, and hated admitting it out loud even more, but the conversation he’d overheard between Coran and Shiro hadn’t been wrong. 

“It’s - look, before Shiro I didn’t - everybody I dealt with I was just-“ 

The two mice were quiet, sitting up on their haunches, listening.

Usually he did have an easier time talking to animals than people, but this wasn’t like the old rattlesnake that hung around the shack; the mice were people, even if they had to resort to keyboards and shenanigans to be understood. He scrubbed his face, folding his arms around his legs again. “I got bounced around until the system screwed up and lost track of me at the end, and by that point, I was in the Garrison and just - got too old for them to keep trying to find a home for. I _know_ what it’s like to think you can trust people and have everything look okay, and then have it all get turned on you, especially when you’re - vulnerable and can’t do anything about it.” 

Shiro had been right; he was terrified of people, and used to puffing up and hissing like a stray cat expecting to get hit. 

The two mice nodded soberly. 

“I know Zarkon was - family, like the people that were _supposed_ to be family for me. And … if trying to figure out who I can trust and actually - accept it and _not_ feel like I’m going to get kicked or abandoned any second is this hard for _me_ , with my planet still there and not even a hundredth of what she’s been through…”

He ducked his head, resting his forehead on his knees and hiding his face. There were tiny paws climbing up his sleeve, then Chulatt had crawled inside his jacket collar, curling up against his neck. 

“I know I didn’t do anything to her, but - I can’t expect her to just… forget everything that happened to her.” 

Even if it did mean losing one of the few friends he had. 

There was another set of paws scrabbling up, and then Plachu settled on top of his head, fussing with his hair. 

**********************

After landing, meeting with everyone else, and confirming they needed more time for the Teludav to be done, the first thing he split off to do was find out where Ralar was, with Lance fast on his heels the second he heard what Keith was asking. They were given directions to an area that seemed to take up half of a floor in the central tower, partway up and with only a couple of entrances - secure and where it would be easy to monitor who was coming and going. It was also a restricted area; Ryner had definitely planned around the possibility someone might get vindictive at the child for being Galra.

There was a main hallway with one door leading to a central room; as soon as Keith walked in, there was a violet blur attached to his waist.

And two more in the room, one that looked younger, another around Ralar’s age.

And another that was a little taller and probably older that peered around the door.

It took a moment to recognize the grown Galra who had a chair by the window and a small computer that was apparently on child-watching duty as the soldier Lance had talked into surrendering; he didn’t seem surprised at all to see them. “See, I was pretty sure they’d be back.” 

Ralar looked up from burying her face in Keith’s jacket to glower at him; Keith was left awkwardly petting her head, unsure what counted as normal fussing, but it apparently was the right guess. Lance managed to slip around him, looking around the room. “You know, I probably should’ve expected, this but…”

“Yeah, the evacuation was a mess. There’s actually fewer kids than other stranded idiots like me; this wasn’t a post with a lot of civilian personnel or anything, and it only barely counted in the range where there’d be civilian-family-members, so there weren’t that many to begin with and most of them had a few people besides the immediate caretaker that were more together than the Commander.” The ex-soldier had barely looked up from whatever he was reading. “Ryner’s still working on sorting this out, and there’s a few _real_ idiots that are in stricter confinement after surviving taking the whole Victory or Death thing a little too seriously.” 

Keith managed to get loose enough to sit down next to Ralar “How’ve things been? You OK?”

“I guess?” She settled down sitting on the ground; Lance folded up next to him. “Nothing awful’s happened. We’re not allowed out except into the old gardens.”

“Yeah. That might not change for a while.” He realized he was getting suspicious looks from the other two, and the older one around the door was still watching from as-much-hidden-as-possible in the doorway, but tuned that out for now; Lance found a colored ball nearby and tried rolling it to the smaller one. The ball bumped the child’s leg and Lance earned the kind of stare that usually went with the words ‘what is wrong with you’ for his trouble. “We’re going to be glad when it’s all over ourselves.” 

The one hiding half behind the doorframe growled; the ex-soldier looked over with the tired focus of someone gauging how likely they were to need to move soon. 

“Nobody believes me about the old history stuff.” She had a sideways glare back at the other two in the room, pointedly ignoring the one in the door. “…Well, the Olkari do. And he does.” She jerked her head toward the ex-soldier. “A couple of the other adults do.” 

Lance almost said something, then all the connections of the entire political situation and the way the other children were acting connected, and he gave Keith a helpless look.

“It’s been buried pretty deep, and it’s not easy to deal with, the way everything is now.” He wasn’t feeling like he had much more of a clue than Lance did at this point, with three others who had apparently accepted dealing with the Olkari but who were still clinging to what they’d been raised with. “I can probably leave copies of a lot of it.” 

“It might help.” The ex-soldier was still keeping half an eye on the doorway. “If nothing else, I’m curious about it now myself.” 

There was another quiet growl from the doorway, and Keith finally just focused his attention that way, trying to stay as neutral in expression as he could; the older Galra child hissed and retreated back behind the door. 

Lance looked to the ex-soldier and jerked his head toward the door with a raised eyebrow. It was a smart decision; there really wasn’t a good way to ask within earshot of all of the kids there. 

The Galra looked between them and the door, visibly nervous. “Uh. You should probably ask Ryner about Torek. He’s not taking any of this well.” 

Keith nodded; Lance gave the doorway a worried frown. 

They spent a couple hours there with the kids; by the end of it Lance had managed to lure the youngest of them closer, and was pulling old pictures from Earth up on his phone, running through random bits of stories about his family and his nieces and nephews; he had Ralar’s attention and the youngest’s, with the other one in the room starting to fidget and try to lean over without looking like they were interested. 

Then the younger one looked up at him. “What about your family? Do you have parents or siblings like that?”

Ralar’s ears dropped as she winced; Keith looked away, then inhaled. 

The kid didn’t know, and he was in a room full of other kids that’d lost anything like a family they might’ve had. The best thing he could do was be honest. 

“Not… really. I never knew my mom, and my dad vanished when I was pretty young. His family was pretty lousy, so I kept getting bounced around because every place I got put ended up not wanting me, and…” He closed his eyes; it wasn’t really much of a secret anymore, and as much as he wanted to keep Zarkon’s people from exploiting it, this was probably the last place it was going to get leaked.

Assuming whoever he and Hunk had rescued hadn’t already relayed it.

“I’m not - entirely human, but Earth isn’t in contact with anybody yet, so nobody knew or knew how to handle it, and it made it a lot harder to get along.”

Ralar’s ears went as close to straight up as they could get and she rocked sitting up straighter. “ _I knew it!_ I knew I heard you growling! You’re Galra, aren’t you?!” 

He needed a moment to catch up, dumbfounded.

“I told you man, you’re not great at hiding things,” Lance added. 

He finally just shrugged. “Part?” 

That got the younger one climbing in his lap and grabbing his face to squint at him. “You don’t look Galra.” 

He stared back; he was finally getting the hang of reflexively avoiding some of the odder noises again, and he knew he couldn’t get quite the volume or right sound of a pureblooded Galra, but after a couple of deep breaths and attempts he managed a rumbling huff that was probably thinner and way higher pitched than it should’ve been. 

The kid went wide-eyed and open-mouthed, staring at him with some kind of weird squawk-chirp; Lance just nodded. “Yeah, he’s Galra. I’ve seen him run around opening doors and working stuff that’s set to only respond to Galra.” 

The younger one was quickly joined by Ralar putting both hands on his forearm to lean in herself. “How does that even _work_? You don’t look like it at all, you don’t even have teeth!”

“I don’t know?” That got a little more awkward when the younger one tried to grab his face again to keep his mouth open a little longer to check Ralar’s assertion that he “didn’t have teeth”. He almost lost balance trying to get loose, which got a quiet snicker from Lance. “Either it’s a generation or two back, or it was Mom and she -” He was getting stared at way too close again. “Uh, if it was Mom she must’ve - done something so I could pass for human?” 

It turned into a session of fifty questions about him and how much Galra he was while he got crawled over and inspected, until the ex-soldier was left trying to not start snickering, Lance wasn’t even bothering hiding that he was laughing, the other child in the room was finally giving up on not acting like they weren’t listening, and he caught a few more glimpses of Torek glaring from the doorway. 

After a while one of the Olkari leaned in to get them for something; he left frazzled and not sure what had just happened. Lance clapped his shoulder, still laughing off and on. “You know, you were the _last_ person I expected to be good with kids, but - you’re actually good with kids!” 

**************************************

At first he wasn’t going to go out into the city when Lance and Shiro wandered out to look around, but rattling around the central tower was starting to get nerve wracking; too much restless energy with nothing to do.

He finally did give up and head out; getting out also meant less chance of randomly crossing paths with Allura.

Much of the damage from the fighting before the Galra had evacuated was cleaned up; the barricades, dead drones, and corpses were gone. Some of the more superficial damage to buildings was already repaired, while the worse damage and gaping holes in some of the buildings had teams of Olkari working on repairs, scaffolds raised and flying drones that were a mix of conventional machinery and the living plant-based constructs of the forest dwellers running materials and supplies around the city.

There were people wandering the streets like any other city, children running along yelling and playing, while small aerial vehicles hummed overhead.

It was a living city again; he usually wasn’t very fond of cities, but after seeing it subdued, enslaved, and too-silent, then turned into a war zone, the noise and bustle was actually comforting instead of crowding. 

They were managing to accomplish something. It might have only been one world in a universe that was still on fire, but one world was still a lot of lives. It made the war feel distant, less like a vast and insurmountable task. 

The Olkari were mostly preoccupied with their own lives, but he was still drawing attention - he was the only non-Olkari in the area and they seemed to trend more toward earth tones and muted colors in contrast to his bright red and black. 

He was used to getting whispers and stares, but the entire demeanor was different - it was more like the kind of attention he got when he was back at the faires in black armor, only with a little more of a tinge of awe and admiration.

And there were a few children that had stopped, stared, then followed him for a few hundred yards, ducking behind planters and dividers to peek over and around. 

It wasn’t bad, to catch whispers of “Paladin?” instead of the less nice gossip he was used to, even if it was a little surreal. 

He was winding through the city vaguely the direction of the forest anyway; it had been a long time since he’d been able to just go somewhere away from people in peace. 

“Hey Keith!” He froze at first, startled out of his thoughts by Hunk waving to get his attention. 

He wandered over; Hunk was with an Olkari, off the street around some kind of open building that actually looked like it was meant to be open, raised terraces with benches and planters with fresh sprouts and new growth set in around them. 

The Olkari was dressed in the earth tones they seemed to favor, with the green and gold trim Ryner was using to mark her people; it took Keith a moment to recognize the man out of slave garb and in better health. 

“La Sai?” 

La Sai smiled and waved with a nod; he still had more of a tension about him than the others he was with, but was much less harried and gaunt than when Keith had seen him last. 

“I was hanging around the workshops this morning, then going out for fresh air and lunch came up, so I tagged along.” Hunk patted La Sai’s shoulder, earning a brief look of confusion and a resigned headshake. 

“Actually Ryner insisted I take a break and ‘suggested’ I make sure Hunk actually took some time to relax as well while you all could,” La Sai added. 

Hunk gave a sheepish smile and shrugged. 

“I’m surprised you didn’t drag Pidge out here with you.” 

“I don’t think I could get her out of Ryner’s office with cargo clamps.” La Sai at least seemed good humored about it. “It mostly sounded like other conversations and five hundred questions; when I got shooed out she’d finally cornered Ryner about your predecessors.” 

“Oh yeah.” Hunk paused thoughtfully. “Ryner was there then, wasn’t she.”

“Sort of. Turns out she was just a child, so most of what she remembers is public appearances and the lions being around. There wasn’t a lot of worry about security with them since they’re almost indestructible, so she’d poked at them as a kid.” 

La Sai was definitely more relaxed, even though the subject matter was something that was another of the unreal moments - Ryner being almost ten thousand years old as one part. 

“It’s kind of hard to imagine sometimes - all of us next to these big ancient heroes.” Keith leaned on one of the terrace walls; even with Red’s interjections of times the old Paladins had done things a lot like they did, or been just as much prone to jokes, goofing off, and general idiocy, it was hard to avoid the legends.

La Sai motioned to the city around them, where people were going about their day freely and rebuilding. “Well, you’ve got a good start on living up to it so far. Especially if everything goes well in the next few weeks.” The Olkari did have a pause at that, a sidelong look at Hunk in warning - a public street wasn’t the place to discuss what they were working on.

Keith wasn’t sure if Hunk took the hint or just was more interested elsewhere; it could’ve been both, really.

“That’s something we were wondering about - the way Zarkon just kinda forgot about this place, if one of the old Paladins was Olkari or something.” 

La Sai tilted his head. “You know, before overhearing Pidge and Ryner in the office, I wouldn’t have known either - but there weren’t any Olkari on the old team. Our people were active in the old confederations, though, and Alfor and Trigel both were incredibly curious and capable researchers in their own right, so we apparently used to see a lot of the Red and Green lions especially, along with some other technicians and scholars of their worlds that they brought to visit.” 

There was a moment as Keith was lost in his own thoughts and processed what La Sai had just said, while Hunk just nodded with a quiet acknowledging noise.

Then it sank in that the Yellow lion had just been ruled out and La Sai had just blithely opened Schrodinger’s box and dumped it on Keith’s head. For a brief moment, he thought he might be able to shove everything into another similar box, since his previous reason for ruling out the Green paladin had been the idea that they’d been Olkari, but there was a stirring from Red in the back of his mind that translated as nothing more than a giant eyeroll and a brief impression of Zarkon tallying off how many times Alfor had gotten in over his head and needed to be carried back.

And that being related directly to why she’d gotten so good at going to fetch her Paladin when they got themselves in trouble.

He stiffened with a strangled noise, burying his head in his hands; Hunk stopped short of whatever he’d been about to say, staring at Keith with only slightly less confusion than La Sai. 

“ _Likesheneededmorereasonstohateme_ ” was heavily muffled. 

“Ooooh.” Hunk nodded, catching where the problem was.

La Sai looked between both of them, uncertain. “…I think I missed something here.”

Keith hadn’t regained enough composure to answer, which unfortunately meant Hunk taking over. “Well, Allura and Coran don’t really talk about the Old Paladins because it’s kind of still a pretty painful subject, since they knew them and all, and not many people remember, and _apparently_ Keith didn’t know her father was his predecessor, which she might be a little more upset about since she’s kinda still upset about finding out that he’s part Galra.” 

La Sai had his own moment of processing.

Keith wasn’t sure what would be the worst he could've picked out of that ramble.

He looked up to give Hunk a look of the most sheer exasperated betrayal he could manage, fingers curved as he motioned in frustration.

La Sai just stared at him, looking dumbfounded, and definitely seemed to have decided he can’t have heard that right. “…You’re what?”

Hunk shrugged, holding it for a few seconds. Keith glared, folding his arms, then looked around to make sure there wasn’t anybody close enough to overhear easily.

“I’m part Galra. We finally got it confirmed beyond all shadow of a doubt.” 

There was another long moment of dumbfounded stare and processing.

La Sai sat down heavily on the nearest bench, arms draped over his knees. “…Okay then. That’s - you know, I think I’m past caring, and it’s a conversation for not-the-middle-of-the-street.” He took a deep breath. “So. How did you not know you had Alfor’s lion? Didn’t you say the kid had been going through everything he’d left in the lion last time you were here?”

“Well - _yeah_ , but - look we’ve all got a lot of Altaean things in our room, I thought maybe there was just a lot of Altaean clothing because the Castle’s mostly Altaean so it happened that way?!” He made a few helpless hand gestures and looked to Hunk.

“Uh. Not in Yellow’s storage stuff. I mean I didn’t take anything out or talk about it because I didn’t want to upset Allura but I got curious, okay?”

Of course Hunk had looked and would fail him. Of course this would be one of the times Hunk did manage to figure out what discretion meant.

“…The kid made herself sick on _Altaean_ emergency rations.” La Sai had returned to staring at Keith, boggling over this.

“Look, I’ve had enough to worry about with figuring out what I am, I didn’t really want to go and add trying to make sense of having _King Alfor’s lion_ to that!” 

La Sai’s boggled stare continued for a few long moments, although there was something almost horrified awe in it, before he buried his head in his hands with an odd sort of vibrato wheezing groan. He stayed that way for a couple seconds before he straightened part way.

“Okay, we’re starting to get into conversations to not have in the middle of the street again.” He levered back standing. “How about this. We get lunch, and then go back to one of the secure courtyards where there’s fresh air and _not_ millions of random uninvolved civilians and unknowns.” 

“Sounds like a plan to me; we didn’t really get a chance to try out the local cuisine last time we were here.” Hunk’s curiosity had kicked in, and Keith hoped La Sai was ready for dealing with the likelihood Hunk would drag them across half the city being slightly fussy.

La Sai motioned for them to follow out onto the street, but stopped before leaving the little terrace park. “…Actually we might have a problem with that. Or rather,” he turned, pointing at Keith right behind him. “You might have a problem with that.” 

Keith blinked blankly, tilting his head.

La Sai had another long-suffering moment, glancing around the street again to make sure nobody was close by, before he dropped his voice. “Which side of your heritage won out on diet? Because humans seem to be able to handle almost anything, but Olkari are not meat eaters.” 

And Galra were obligate carnivores.

There were a couple more wide blinks, and uncomfortable memories of large parts of his childhood spent sick and confusing doctors, nevermind the Hell that was getting briefly placed with a vegan family. He could handle probably way more than a pureblooded Galra, but that didn’t stop him from having a list of dietary restrictions as long as his arm. “Oh.” 

The Olkari sighed. “That’s what I was afraid of. Look, just - come up with some excuse, we have more than we know what to do with left over from the occupation anyway.” 

Keith nodded, and La Sai led out into the city.

Following someone who knew where they were going was a very different trip across the city from slow wandering using the central tower as a not-always-visible landmark; they were covering a lot more distance, and taking occasional trips across narrower alleyways and spaces between buildings. 

The shortcuts just ended up highlighting how prone to open areas the Olkari architecture was, with alleys that looked like they should’ve just been narrow cuts through large buildings opening into small squares, with occasional tucked away fountains in varying stages of ill-repair and broken bits of mostly abstract-looking sculpture, and some small trees and bits of plants. Much like the more open areas of the city, there was signs of more efforts at planting and adding greenery, with some of it looking like it had been there for a while while others were clearly new growth and containers with only small leaves and shoots sticking out. 

Keith was also, now that he had to be less focused on where they were going, getting more aware of the number of inset balconies and areas where what he’d previously taken as just windows were turning out to be retractable, large parts of the city a honeycomb capable of being open-air in good weather. 

Sure enough, they ended up meandering for a while as La Sai found areas where there were more public spaces with restaurants and cafes, and Hunk insisted on hovering to get a look around and gauge whether or not it was a good place to stop, a process that involved as much watching patrons as the places themselves. 

That eventually landed them by a small open stand in another terrace park that had signs of a decent amount of traffic and cheerful noise; Hunk stopped him before they could get close, grabbing his shoulder and leaning in. La Sai stopped in front of them, registering that they were lagging behind, and read the way Hunk was leaning in as a sign to play lookout for anyone coming too close. 

“Okay, so, what _can_ you get away with, because I know you had nopales and fruit and stuff back in the shack and the Garrison didn’t have a carnivore diet option.” 

Keith needed a moment to process; he wasn’t sure how this would translate to whatever the Olkari had, but if anybody could figure it out, it’d be Hunk. “Uhm. White rice, white bread, pumpkin… I mean some of the fruit I had wasn’t stuff I could get away with _much_ of, the nopales were usually okay though? And mushrooms.”

Hunk frowned, thinking seriously. “Alright. So like a dog, kind of, but with even less tolerance for plant fiber.” He clapped his hands on Keith’s shoulders with a nod, then turned back to La Sai.

Keith hung back out of the way, sitting on one of the benches of the terrace, while they were talking with the Olkari running the stand; he caught parts of it, and Hunk gesturing to him and explaining something about a ‘medical condition’ and ‘special diet’. La Sai got cut off when bringing up compensation, the cook shaking their head and motioning to him and Hunk as “half the reason I can be out here in the open”, then continued with something about “the way things are right now, it’s not like it matters anyway”. 

Then there was some kind of exchange where he was getting referenced and the cook handed Hunk some kind of small spoonful of something; Keith caught the words ‘apparently painful to some species’. Hunk tested it cautiously, then turned around.

La Sai was paying attention to something else, and under the circumstances, it probably meant there was something La Sai wasn’t saying. 

“HEY KEITH! How are you with spicy? This’s like, hundred-k on the scoville scale - habanero level.” 

Keith shrugged. “Sounds fine?” 

Hunk turned back and gave the okay on whatever it was. 

After a few minutes they both wandered up to the same terrace, with bowls; Hunk was juggling two, passing one to Keith. 

La Sai had something that seemed to be a mix of roasted thin roots that looked barely more edible than tree bark; Hunk’s bowl looked like spiced cut fruit, and Keith was looking at some kind of pale porridge.

It turned out to be heavily spiced in more ways than one, almost like a sweet curry, with a base that was like rice porridge with some strips of something more solid that reminded him of wild mushrooms.

“One of the parts of that isn’t native here.” La Sai was keeping his voice down, otherwise acting natural; Keith had picked a higher bench on the terrace. “It’s something underground-growing the Galra brought; apparently we’re one of the other species with compatible biochemistry that doesn’t get burning sensations from it.” 

“Yeah we’ve got plants with fruit that’s full of the stuff, or something pretty close - humans get the burning thing too, but then our nervous system goes ‘alarm, alarm, release the painkillers’ so people will seek it out ‘cuz it’s like, one of the few safe mild highs once you get used to it. We’ve got painkillers based off it, too. Also kills bacteria, so a lot of hot-weather areas use a lot of it in their cooking to slow spoiling. ” Hunk looked sideways at Keith, squinting and dropping his voice; he was much worse at acting natural. “Wait, capsaicin doesn’t affect you?”

Keith had to pause to swallow, motioning with his spoon. “Kind of? I mean, it burns a little, but not nearly as bad as what other people get.” He shrugged. “I get some of the rest of it, I think, like my nervous system isn’t sure what to do with it, even if it doesn’t last long; Shiro thinks passing me ghost peppers is hilarious.” 

“Well, if we find any of the fermented stuff left behind, we know who to give it to,” La Sai said drily. Keith wasn’t sure if the Olkari meant him, or Shiro, but he had a sense of dread that it was probably Shiro. 

The little terrace square was busy and mostly the good sort of lively, although Keith noticed that only about a third of the patrons seemed to be paying, and there were several occurrences of people dropping off bags or jars before placing orders. La Sai apparently noticed him watching the exchanges.

“Our population was either slaves or pockets in hiding that were dealing with whatever they could manage for resource organization under threat; right now our economy is mostly barter, favors, multidirectional charity, and dazed confusion.” He leaned his face on one hand. “It’s working right now because of how much everyone’s focused on recovering and trying to rebuild; it’s not going to hold forever. Ryner’s already got people scrambling to work out at least legal codes and some kind of organized administration for government functions - it’s probably going to be a messy hybrid of the way the forest cities were run adjusted for the change in circumstances, and what we can reconstruct of what existed before the Galra.” 

“So she really is the Queen now.” It didn’t sound bad to Keith at all; Ryner was a good, level-headed leader with a solid sense of ethics that cared about her people. 

“Yeah. She was from the time we brought Lubos in and we all started throwing behind her instead of him.” He set aside his empty bowl, leaning back on the bench. “Honestly, she was royalty as soon as most of the forest people and exile populations threw in behind her, just not the Monarch.” 

“Your royalty isn’t a hereditary thing?” Hunk was still finishing his meal; he’d been taking it slower than either of the other two. 

La Sai shook his head. “No, it’s - a thing that comes with authority?” He paused, awkward with the visible realization that he was talking to people with no concept of things he was used to taking for granted. “It has to do with how our powers and energy systems work.” 

If it was meant to be a full explanation, it failed; he had both of the Paladins’ full interest. 

“Okay. Most species, yours included, have a fairly simple energy structure - there’s an internal system with mostly well defined structure that usually stays within the physical body, then output from that which radiates around it and has a defined boundary, kind of like an air bubble underwater.” He was making hand gestures at first, looking like he would’ve dearly loved a pen and paper, then he finally brought out a small tin of metal filings and opened it, shaping the filings into a model of what he’d just described. 

“Olkari don’t really have the bubble; we have more like - a bunch of feelers that connect outward; there’s some that are pretty slow to move or change that connect between us and other major power sources in our area, like the planet we’re living on, then a bunch of small ones that are constantly moving that give us the ability to manipulate other materials.” The model reshaped, the outer parts turning into something almost like a fractal structure with some larger, more solid straight parts going out. “That’s also why we can work so well in teams; it basically interlinks so that we can all put power into the same thing at the same time to accomplish more than any one of us could individually. It does backlash some one of those is severed violently - almost never enough to kill, but it can be pretty traumatic, and a bad enough backlash will screw up control for a while. The bigger the backlash, the more it hurts and the worse of a scramble it causes.” 

The filings turned into a bunch of interconnected points; he poked out one point with a finger, and the whole thing had to spend a second rearranging to compensate and restructure.

“Olkari that hold authority consistently basically get stronger tethers to the rest of the group; they can act as a source of direction when we’re actively doing something, and while it doesn’t increase what they can actively do a _huge_ amount, it does act as a kind of support that slows aging - we all live pretty long by everyone else’s standards, but we don’t actually know for sure how long the ‘natural’ lifespan for a royal is. It takes a lot of backlash to destabilize them - like, taking out a number of the people under them - while they’re a support for everyone else… which is why we were so hamstrung while the Galra had Lubos, before Ryner got him to abdicate and usurped him. If they’d killed him while he was still King, it would’ve thrown most of the population into a backlash trauma.” He looked up, already seeing a looming question. “Some of what she did was a very literal power-grab - it’s possible for someone near in power to just grab the connections and take them, but it doesn’t hold for very long if they don’t do something to cement support afterwards.” 

Keith was suddenly uncomfortably aware of his hostage stunt, and that the only thing that made it mostly a bluff was tactical calculation, not that he wouldn’t have killed the guy. “…And you helped me use him as a hostage?” 

La Sai’s expression hardened, eyes narrowing. “It might have impacted _us_ , but you all would’ve been unaffected, and you saw how he was using our people. I trusted you Paladins to keep fighting, and we would’ve still been better off in the long run.” Then, he looked away. “Although I was gambling a little that there’d be other royalty in a position to take over and help everything recover out there somewhere.” 

Hunk poked at his now-empty bowl with an unhappy, thoughtful stare; it was a heavy moment of the kind of stakes and stark realities they were dealing with intruding in, unavoidable. 

After a few quiet minutes, La Sai gathered the bowls up to take back down to the small stall. Hunk was still pensive, visibly taking more time to mull over the implications of that situation; for Keith, it basically just meant the stakes on his stunt had been a little higher in about the same shape. 

They’d been noticed, even though most of the Olkari had been polite enough to give them their space, just watching quietly from a distance with occasional whispers; while they were quiet and La Sai had stepped away, one broke away from a small group to walk up to them.

“Excuse me - you’re two of the Paladins of Voltron, aren’t you?” They were tentative, nervous, standing near to Hunk.

“Uh - Yeah, we are? I mean, we definitely are, the lions are just a little big to take around the town and it’s not fun to spend all the time in armor.” 

The Olkari fussed for a moment, with something in their hands, then leaned forward fast to hang something around Hunk’s neck, hurrying over to Keith with another of the necklaces he hadn’t gotten a look at to do the same while he blinked in confusion.

“Thank you, for bringing hope back.” They bowed and hurried away before either of them could react; the small group they were with gave a few careful waves and a couple bows before they continued on down the street. 

Keith looked down, running fingers along the delicate chain; it was made of wood, each link shaped into intricate loops and designs that were grown together with no seams, and there was a noticeable warmth whenever his fingers lingered on a bead, a warmth that was also there along the back of his neck where it was in contact with skin. 

La Sai found them both fidgeting with the beads, entranced, when he came back; he waited for them to notice, falling back into the kind of at-ease relief he’d had when Keith had first walked up. “You know, I could just show you around the city for a while, if you want.” 

*******************************

When they got back to the central tower, the Green Lion was out of the Castle, sitting in front of it; Pidge was sitting up on the lion’s head watching the sunset, and waved down at them with a holler and no sign of inclination to come down in range to talk. 

Ryner was sitting on one of the lion’s claws, leaning back against its foot, running something through her fingers; there was a delicate chiming sound, almost like a music box, coming from whatever it was. She almost seemed to be in a trance; the first sign she’d even noticed there presence was just her speaking when they came close enough to see that there were also flickers of colored light from whatever she was toying with.

“It looks like you had a good day out.” Her hands stopped moving, and the chiming and bits of light stopped. “You all need it - none of us will survive this if we don’t take what time we have to appreciate what is working out when we can.” 

“Yeah. I’d still like to see more of what the engineers were working on, but it was nice to get out.” Hunk was smiling.

Keith had to admit that while he wasn’t fond of crowds, it’d actually been a good day out; the weather was good and seeing the city rebuilding was the kind of perspective it was easy to forget sometimes when they were under fire and things were going wrong. He was still running the beads he’d been given through his fingers occasionally. 

La Sai excused himself to get back to the tower; Ryner let him go without comment.

“You know, when I was a child, I tried to talk to the Green Lion; she was strong enough back then to make a game out of growing small flowers around her feet, and I used to play with them. Our people had left behind working with living matter long before, except for a few isolated tribes that were content to carry on traditions for harvests and homes; too imprecise, more difficult to control. I didn’t think about it as more than a children’s game until the only place we had to flee the Galra was into the forests, and all we had was the life around us - then I wondered what our ancestors could have done with the knowledge we had then, and why shouldn’t we try to find out?” 

She was running fingers over whatever was in her hands again, a few slow chimes and bits of light. After a quiet moment, she hopped down off the claw to stand in front of them, holding out the small device in her hand to the two of them in cupped hands.

It looked like a small circle of gold with enamel that had faint, glowing etchings inside of it, five colors that were familiar by then. There was something naggingly familiar about the materials and the aesthetics of it; it wasn’t Olkari make, some of the design looked Altaean, but the etchings that seemed to be part of the chiming effect weren't familiar at all. “After a few visits, Alfor and Trigel started making trinkets to slip to some of the children that were brave enough to go up to them and the lions. I’m sure there’s more of them, still around somewhere, passed down as reminders.” 

Hunk reached out to run a gentle finger along the curves of it; it chimed with little flickers of colored light.

Red was stirring, paying attention with an old pang of aching nostalgia that crept in until it filled his chest with a warm weight; echoes of laughter and happier days. “…Alfor and the old Green Paladin made this.” 

And he was trying to follow in the footsteps of one of those two; Allura’s comments about the Paladins serving as symbols were nagging, and he was pretty sure the best he’d manage trying to mimic Alfor’s ease with public appearances would be awkward and involve a lot of floundering. 

Ryner nodded. “They were the ones to visit Olkarion the most often, although they weren’t the only ones that would find time to get away from protocol and business to try to spend time with the people and play with children; even Zarkon, no matter how much he tried to pretend to be reluctant for the sake of his decorum.” She looked up from the tiny enchanted chime, with an obvious and intentional moment of her eyes lingering on the wood chains they were both wearing. “You all really do remind me of them as they were then; they would be proud of you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hunk's ramble about capsaicin is basically true. We don't actually have a painkiller based on it yet, but it is one of the strong avenues of research for alternatives to the current situation, where almost all painkillers that aren't anti-inflammatories are opiate based. 
> 
>  
> 
> Chapter title is from The Golden Age by Woodkid -  
>  _I can hear the call as I'm walking through the door_  
>  Did you ever dream  
> We'd miss the mornings in the sun  
> The playgrounds in the street  
> The bliss of slumberland...  
> But the golden age is over


	30. Sometimes you've got to believe in something - because you're not the only one

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ryner manages to wrangle everyone for a dinner, and Antok is faced with the tremendous problem that he can't eat with the mask on, while Lance gets to tell a few stories.
> 
> Shiro's "the universe won't need Voltron anymore" does manage to give Keith a crisis that gets Kolivan and Antok involved.
> 
> (And the kids show up again.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You might notice that there's now 35 chapters listed total - I am not abandoning this, just... going to find a breakpoint and make a series out of it. At some point soon I'm going to start posting a few short one-shots going back touching on things with others in the cast over the course of everything.
> 
> Truce proper is going to be Keith-PoV through to the end; the next part (which will probably get just as bad for "how did this get so big", to be honest) I am considering swapping PoV's more, since some of the reasons I had to stick with just his are going to be less of a thing.

Ryner managed to gather their entire team for dinner, along with La Sai and a couple of her ranking engineers who had assisted with the teludav’s construction. There was a neat half of the table set for the Paladins and the Altaeans; Keith slid in next to Kolivan on the far side of the others. Slav was on the other side of the two Blades, with the Olkari engineers on the other side, having an animated conversation about some kind of theoretical physics that made Keith’s head hurt to walk past; Pidge and Hunk hadn’t settled in their seats, standing over by the engineers listening and taking notes.

Keith could follow physics, it was a necessity for being a pilot, but they were thousands of years out of anything he understood. 

Eventually Pidge and Hunk settled down, a little ahead of the meal. 

There had been leftover stores and livestock from the occupation, more than enough to accommodate the Galra, and Keith was following their lead on what was edible; it was mostly an odd sort of relief to not have to worry about anyone noticing, even if Allura acting like he wasn’t there dampened it.

And Antok was still wearing his mask, staring at the food on the table uncomfortably. 

Kolivan looked aside. “If they’re aware of us, then they’ve likely realized you’re still alive.”

Antok made a quiet rumble, acknowledging that, but still hesitating. Ryner was listening, hands folded in front of her with an expression of interest, while Keith realized La Sai had been uneasy any time he’d been in the same room with Antok. 

“And confirming your survival would not give any clues to our locations.”

Antok made another faint rumble, then sighed and deactivated the mask, pulling his hood down sullenly. He was the second Galra Keith had seen after Sendak to almost have a muzzle, although his ears were narrower, and angled back hard as soon as they were free of the helmet. A few darker markings ran across his face, but were only half legible, mottled with pale, ragged and blotchy scars. 

La Sai shifted back in his seat, and Ryner’s eyes took on an impish glint. “Why, I hadn’t expected to be host to such an illustrious hero of the Empire, particularly not posthumously.”

Antok gave Ryner a dim look, then turned his head just enough to glare sideways at Kolivan. “This is why I don’t take it off.”

Slav snickered, and Antok shot the inventor a glare that had absolutely no effect. 

Lance looked across the table; there were a couple whispers between the two Olkari engineers that had been working with Slav, but they seemed to have decided to follow Ryner’s lead and take whatever had just come out in stride, even if La Sai still looked unsure. 

“Okay we’re missing something aren’t we,” Lance said simply.

“Fleet Commander Antok was once something of a legend for his campaign against a particularly tenacious band of rebels and pirates in a frontier region, before his untimely and _tragic_ demise attempting to corner the spy and saboteur that had plagued his territory, too late to stop the destruction of an in-progress transit hub.” Ryner was enjoying herself far too much.

“Rebels and pirates that had an uncanny ability to predict when the worst attempts at cornering them would occur and where the best tactical targets were, with a spy and saboteur whose identity was never known,” he corrected. 

“So you were a big deal in the Empire?”, Hunk asked uncertainly. 

Antok apparently decided to ignore the discussion in favor of his meal.

Kolivan was trying to stoneface, but even he seemed to be finding some humor in the whole thing. “We occasionally manage to infiltrate to high ranks, yes. It rarely lasts for long periods of time, particularly if the rank includes being anywhere in the vicinity of central command, because of Haggar and her Druids… but they rarely travel to border territories. Antok holds one of our best records for high rank in visible positions.” 

Shiro paused, looking about to say something, then looked down; Keith had a guess where the question would’ve gone, with their introduction to the Blade being someone who’d been working in incredibly close proximity to the Druids.

“It’s even more rare to _survive_ that kind of assignment.” Antok hadn’t lasted long avoiding the conversation. “My ‘untimely demise’ was almost very real.” 

“So your second in command was in on it?” La Sai was, at least, starting to adjust, even if he had lapsed into a sharper demeanor. “Since his story was that he’d been wounded fighting the saboteur, and you had ordered him away to take them on yourself… but if you _were_ the saboteur…”

Antok gave a half headshake. “Not really. He was not awful as higher ranking officers in the Empire went - a pragmatist with a grasp of morale and little patience for wasting resources on pointless cruelties. I think finding out I had been the enemy we were hunting all along finally broke him into complete disillusionment; last I’d heard he’d retired to the middle of nowhere. I suspect he believed I was dead along with everyone else.” 

“Well, I’m impressed.” Ryner was still bemused, even if she wasn’t chasing the more blatant teasing anymore. “It’s good to hear that some of the Galra found some memory of what they once were, nevermind managing to slide past Zarkon’s notice while fighting him for this long.” 

Keith had to wonder if Zarkon himself, or what he used to be, was a part of Ryner’s estimate of what the Galra as a whole once were, after their conversation outside the gate. 

The novelty of Antok’s former fame wore off quickly after that; one of the Olkari engineers started curiosity about the Paladins, and the Blades were more than happy to encourage attention and questions going to the ‘new heroes’ from an world largely unknown to the rest of the known universe. 

Keith awkwardly fumbled through the occasional question directed at him, and was quietly thankful that Lance was enjoying the attention enough to be more than happy to tell stories. Keith also noticed that Lance was visibly occasionally editing some story in mid-retelling, and most of them were times in the Garrison where he’d been a part of it somewhere on the side, which raised questions about how many times Lance had told the stories and what form they’d taken before. 

“Actually you know what, looking back on it, I know exactly what should’ve tipped me off he was Galra, and it wasn’t even anything out in space.” 

Lance was motioning at Keith animatedly, and he wasn’t sure if he should be saying something, trying to get a subject change, shrinking into the table, or letting him go; at this point everyone at the table knew, and Allura seemed to be taking it as a cue to check out of the conversation.

“So the Garrison had these survival training exercises later in training - they’d give you some basic supplies and gear and stuff to test things, and a five person team would get put out somewhere in the middle of nowhere with a panic button to call for help if there was an emergency you couldn’t handle, idea being you’d spend a month out there, right? And Iverson, in one of his many fits of being a petty idiot, decides to split Hunk and me up, and puts me on a team with Keith, his two squadmates back then, and this sweet girl from our grade year that really didn’t deserve any of this.” 

Lance definitely remembered, even if Keith hadn’t really paid attention to much beyond passing the exercise and keeping that shitshow from blowing up. He also had the attention of the table in his dramatic retelling.

“Now, we get put out in the Alaskan wilderness - kinda cooler climate, lots of forests, hundreds of miles to any civilization - and Keith’s not really talking a lot besides barking orders and throwing balls of moss and stuff at people when he had to yell to knock it off one too many times. Caught me upside the head a few times and his two teammates plenty, which I gotta admit was great, because they were assholes.” 

At least Lance had gone back and re-oriented himself that Keith hadn’t actually been involved in them terrorizing him, or all that thrilled with it on the few times he was around for it; that had been most of what he’d yelled at - petty bickering over dumb things and picking. He mostly remembered just wanting peace and quiet and for them to take things seriously, and a few times of snapping ‘if we were really stranded out here this would get us all dead’. 

“He was kind-of a pain in the ass about building up the campsite, but I’ve gotta admit that he did know what he was doing. So first week he finds these black rocks and is really happy about it, but in that kinda creepy way? You know, the kind that usually means there’s violence about to happen.”

“Obsidian,” he corrected. “It was some obsidian chunks, and I was happy because I could use it to make something sharp to hunt with.” 

That alone got a moment of understanding from the Blades, as if they had a sudden idea of where this was going. 

“Right. Anyway, in between being a perfectionist about the camp, he’s setting snares and bringing back rabbits and stuff, I was out fishing, other people were gathering edible plants, he’s making spears out of those obsidian rocks. Which, okay, little creepy, but whatever. Then late in the second week, he goes out with his snares and spears and that knife of his, before the sun comes up, and he’s gone all day. Not a peep from him, no sign of him. We’re starting to talk search parties, when this unholy screaming starts up in the woods and crashing - and then we get him on the radio asking us to come help him pack something back to camp before the local predators show up.” 

Lance actually took a moment to compose himself, steepling his hands in front of him before continuing. “We get out to the location he gives, and it’s a clearing that’s torn up and a mess, blood and broken branches everywhere, a couple of his bigger snares were triggered and torn up, _he’s_ bloody - not his blood - and kind of battered, and he’s just casually skinning and dismembering this elk with his spears stuck in its side - big herbivore with hooves, thing weighed as much as any three of us put together. We’re all staring at him looking like he stepped out of a horror movie and one of his groupies asks if he’s okay, and he just - casually says that oh, the snares and spears didn’t quite bring it down, so he’d _dropped out of a tree_ onto it with that knife to finish it off, and that he’s done that kind of thing before, no big deal!” 

The two Galra were only barely managing straight faces. 

Keith puffed up a little. “What? We had meat for the rest of the trip, and everything went peaceful without all the stupid bickering, so it can’t have been that bad.”

“Of course the fighting settled down, _we all thought you might murder us if we started shit_.” 

Kolivan broke down laughing, Antok not long after; Slav just nodded with an eyeroll. 

Lance shot both of them a half-glare, almost sulking. “Lemme guess. It’s a Galra thing, isn’t it?”

Kolivan managed a nod. “Somewhat. Apparently he certainly figured out how to hunt like one.”

“Actually, around the shack I’d usually be out with a hunting rifle. It’s a lot easier,” Keith corrected drily.

The rifle he had at the shack being a gift from a couple of locals he’d traumatized after they’d run across him getting frustrated and ambushing a javelina, he’d leave out. 

“Usually resorting back to that kind of hunting would be a way to show off, whether to impress someone or prove worth - but, in a survival situation like that, it boils down more to taking responsibility for everyone else, if you have to resort to hunting by yourself.” Kolivan was still not bothering to hide amusement, his normal reserve set aside for a minute; Shiro was actually snickering at that, and Keith shot him a short, sharp glare to not even start. “So it would be about the opposite of considering murdering anyone there.” 

Shiro was radiating smug; he’d already brought up the entire survival exercise as proof Keith did have some kind of leadership instinct buried under all of his abandonment issues, trust issues, and lack of socialization, and he didn’t need for Shiro to say it out loud to know that Shiro was almost mentally poking him with an ‘I was right’ over Kolivan’s commentary. 

“So it’s kinda like the thing cats do where they bring home dead things because they decided that you not hunting means you’re just a big, incompetent cat?” Lance might have framed it like he was continuing the conversation with Kolivan, but he was looking square at Keith, and the best Kolivan could do to a very earth-animal based reference was shrug.

And watch, because it was obvious enough who Lance had meant that for.

Keith rolled his eyes. “Except that elk actually _was_ food for a while.” He could’ve taken the opening Lance had left him other ways, but he still wanted to encourage the whole ‘not throwing barbs at each other’s nerves’ part.

And Shiro had shifted before he’d opened his mouth with more attention on the two of them Just In Case, returning to being more content with the relative peace and actual food afterwards. 

“So did the brass say anything about the whole elk thing to you?” Hunk’s question was amiable, but it also headed off some kind of retort from Lance, who looked sideways and then sighed and went back to his food. 

Keith took a moment. “Sort of? They started to a few times, then changed the subject every time like they didn’t want to know.” Honestly he treasured the memory of the simultaneously impressed, confused, and vaguely frightened expressions pretty much all of the instructors and officers involved, Iverson included, had over the whole thing, and wished he could’ve gotten photos of it. 

Slav coughed quietly; there was something about “like any sane people” muffled in it, and he got simultaneous tired looks from the Blades with an eyebrow raise from Antok.

“Why, did you get anything weird on yours?” Keith was both about ready to pass attention off of him, and pretty sure if Hunk had commented, that meant the brass had hassled him over something, too. 

Hunk was still, with a visible inhale. “They went over my stuff three times when we got back in because they didn’t want to believe I’d managed to improvise that much for camp cooking.” He turned to Pidge, who’d been staying out of the conversation. “You’ve gotta have some stories yourself.”

“I prefer to forget that it ever happened. It was one big blur of poison oak, bug bites, and near-murders.” Hunk started to say something, then realized that it would’ve been after Pidge had started going by Pidge, which…

Would have been a source of tension for being expected to live in very close quarters in the wilderness with a bunch of other people. 

It didn’t stop Ryner from getting a bemused look, after the complaints Pidge had come up with initially during her first visit to Olkarion. 

“Hey, I got better about that.” She stopped, almost fidgeting with her plate. “…Besides the forests _here_ weren’t out to kill me.” 

Some of the conversation meandered again; it came up that as isolated as Olkarion had been in some respects, there was only so much the Galra could do to keep them out of things - 

And having Ryner, La Sai, and the Blades there meant a decent chance to get more of an idea of the general situation out there. Some of their earlier guesses hadn’t really been off, and Keith’s occasional cynic comments about ‘relying on less affected groups deciding to not care about their neighbors as long as they were okay’ got quiet, sober agreement from more than one of the aliens around the table. 

He was pretty sure that there was going to be some kind of contact information exchanged and Ryner almost certainly throwing in backing the Blade of Marmora. 

Eventually dinner wound down and they were left with a quiet evening and the rare opportunity for fresh air and relative peace.

**************************

As the sun set and they headed inside, Keith headed for an upper area, opening the windows to sit out overlooking the planet.

“ _The universe won’t need Voltron anymore._ ”

Everyone else had been relieved and thrilled with the idea, and he knew that his own misgivings were petty as much as anything else; not enough to be worth bringing anything up there to dampen the mood. He couldn’t tell if the ‘it can’t be that easy’ was his own pessimism and being too used to things going wrong, actually being realistic, or clinging into not wanting to lose what he had. Everybody else had something to go back to, after all; he was the only one with nothing else, especially since he doubted Allura would want him hanging around the Castle if they did break up and scatter back to their lives. 

He was turning the currently-dormant knife over in his hands, an old habit fuss. ‘Go find his family’ was probably more likely to be ‘try to find out what happened to his family’. He was getting the impression Blades didn’t leave their weapons behind lightly - that odds were, whatever had been going on, him inheriting the knife meant that whoever it’d originally belonged to hadn’t expected to come back from whatever they were doing alive; passing a clue on to the family and keeping the weapon out of enemy hands in one move. 

If it was his mother, then he wasn’t finding anything that direction, at least not until he worked up the nerve to ask Kolivan about their records; he was still a little terrified of having the answer, now that he had a chance to get it. 

The Galra didn’t have much involvement out Earth’s direction; he knew from the Grey at the mall that other races out fringe-ward occasionally did, so his father finding some way off-planet wasn’t entirely far fetched. If not, there was a veritable host of things that could’ve happened that were more mundane and less abstract.

Leaving the planet unwillingly or some kind of dumb accident was a possibility, and really, it would be his luck to have ended up alone that young because of some other bullshit random event; the universe had a way of grabbing the few people that did care about him and yanking them away. 

If it’d been more willing or he’d just been avoided, which was just as possible, and if his father was still alive, then he’d need to have Words about the situation he’d been abandoned to.

It mostly boiled down to his close family likely being either dead, or not people he’d actually want to stay with once there was some kind of closure, which still left him as the odd one out with nothing to go back to; he wanted Zarkon gone and to put an end to the bloodshed and suffering, but it didn’t make it any less miserable to realize that he wasn’t sure what to do with himself after. 

He caught a couple of dark shapes out in the large courtyard, heading back inside; Kolivan and Antok were the closest he had to family, anymore, and even after the fighting was over they’d have a monumental amount of work to do - 

He’d passed the initiation; he still wasn’t sure where he stood with them, but it was at least solid enough to be worth asking. 

He managed to catch them in one of the lower hallways; Antok still had his mask off, and seemed to be taking his identity and being visible here with the sort of stubborn resigned acceptance that was apparently a Galra trait. They both spotted him as soon as he entered the hallway, Antok showing more visible confused vague concern; he apparently wasn’t very good at playing it off.

“Can I talk to you about something?”

“I don’t think there’s a reason you shouldn’t.” Kolivan sounded unsure, but wasn’t turning him away, at least. 

“Once Zarkon is gone.” He straightened, pulling in a breath; he wasn’t even sure where to start or how to ask. “I don’t - actually have anything to go back to, and I know there’s still going to be a lot of clean-up left.” His throat felt tight and there was already reflex that he knew probably wasn’t as likely as he was afraid of bracing for getting turned away. “Would I be able to fully join the Blade of Marmora to help with the aftermath.”

There was silence; they had some kind of silent exchange that was little more than a couple glances and shifts in expression that he couldn’t quite read or follow.

Kolivan closed his eyes, shaking his head. “After the fighting dies down,” Kolivan put extra weight on each word, pausing after for emphasis, “We would be glad to have you, and by that point, I doubt you’d even need caught up on training beyond learning our protocols and history.” There was definitely some kind of bewildered frustration there. “It’s hardly an urgent concern right now, however.” 

The tiny little cynic part of his mind was starting to raise a victory flag that yes, it was rational, and he realized Red _was_ watching the whole thing with quiet exasperation; she’d finally decided to make herself known more, and hadn’t wanted to intrude earlier as much to give him some space to run circles until he was in a better place to listen to outside input on detangling his own head. 

And Red was as certain as Kolivan sounded that ‘what to do with himself when Voltron wasn’t needed anymore’ wasn’t an immediate worry. 

He looked up at them awkwardly; he had a lot of nervous momentum on this that he now wasn’t sure what to do with, and he was still in the limbo of re-orienting his expectations for the immediate future when he wasn’t sure how much of his own assessments were accurate and how much was just being driven by fear of getting left alone. 

Antok sighed. “Zarkon’s command structure is _huge_ , and he did not get the Empire to that size by keeping all of it dependent on his personal direct oversight. The various commanders and regional rulers he’s instated aren’t going to just give up their power easily; if anything, there’s likely to be a very bloody period of them being more intent on keeping power and grabbing at the vacuum, nevermind the risk that someone will manage to rally enough behind them to either take over themselves or splinter it into factional territories with fledgling regimes of their own.” It was a very calm explanation, even if he had the feeling the tone was the one Antok would take with trainees who were being particularly thick. “It’s not going to be peaceful enough for your group to consider ‘what to do after’ for quite a few decaphoebs, at _best_.” 

“…Right.” He actually felt a little guilty for being relieved at that; everyone else _did_ have homes and families to go back to, and the degree of mess they had to fight through meant dragging that separation out longer. 

“Is there a particular reason for this to come up so suddenly?” The calculating look that had crossed Kolivan’s face was actually worrying.

“I certainly hope you’re not thinking of leaving us to fight the bulk of the Empire on our own,” Antok added, _mostly_ under his breath. 

Keith froze; they were right, the problem was that he knew where it was coming from and that it wasn’t really an answer he could give. He didn’t think Shiro - or any of the others - would at this point; if anything frustration at not getting to go home would get taken out on the commanders and Galra leadership that were still trying to hold power. They wouldn’t be happy about it, but they’d already committed to this war. 

He also wasn’t really in a position to speak for anyone else.

“Uh.”

And explaining why it’d come up now would mean bringing up that it was _Shiro’s_ idea.

“You know. Things?” He shifted weight, looking away; whatever the wall paneling was made of was suddenly absolutely _fascinating_ , and he was trying very hard to ignore being able to catch movement out of the corner of his eye as Antok’s tail started ticking back and forth.

“If you do end up with us eventually, you are _never_ doing infiltration work.” He glanced up at Antok, and both of them were staring at him, visibly unimpressed by the dodge attempt. 

In fact, he was pretty sure he now knew what secondhand embarrassment looked like on a Galra, because that was almost definitely Antok right then.

Kolivan heaved a sigh. “We need to talk to Shiro.” 

They were definitely gauging about where Shiro would be.

“You really don’t have to - I know him, he’s not just going to walk away while things are still a mess-“

They stopped in mid-turn, both looking down at him. “Then we need to talk to him about managing his own expectations, so that this war doesn’t break him,” Antok said.

And then they continued to go find Shiro. Keith tailed after, occasionally tempted to try to talk them out of it again, but well aware it would probably go nowhere.

They found him in the inner courtyard, leaning against the sole tree growing there; the tree looked like it was five feet taller than it’d been when they’d first come to Olkarion, now that Keith looked, and it probably wasn’t his mind playing tricks on him. 

Shiro just looked bewildered at the two Blades with Keith slinking behind; this was his fault, even if it wasn’t anywhere he’d intended any of this to go, and Shiro took his shrink back and looking away as a reason to push away from the tree, looking up at Kolivan and Antok with faint alarm.

And a wary edge that reminded Keith a little too much of Shiro almost getting into a fight with Antok at the end of his trial.

“We apparently need to have a talk about long-term plans.” Kolivan didn’t seem to care, and Antok was half a step behind him.

“What happened - is everything okay?” Shiro looked between them and Keith, staying on Keith for a moment; Keith folded his arms and shrank back, looking away. 

Kolivan and Antok did both look back at Keith briefly, Antok’s tail ticking and Kolivan almost moving to say something, before they turned their attention back to Shiro. Antok shifted weight before he spoke; Keith wasn’t sure if making it easier for him to be mostly hidden behind the much larger Galra was a coincidence or not. “It will be a long time before we can say everything is ‘okay’, but there’s no immediate live fire, so something like.”

Shiro gave the taller Galra a dim look. Keith was beginning to suspect Shiro wasn’t happy to find someone with a sense of humor more bleak and morbid than his had been getting.

“You realize,” Kolivan started before either of them could say anything else, “That when Zarkon falls, much of the Empire’s power structure is unlikely to just give up without a fight, yes?”

Shiro started to answer, stopped, and flagged, face falling. “Yeah.” He took a half-step back, leaning against the tree again. “I can dream, though, can’t I?”

Kolivan shook his head, voice going quieter; Antok was definitely shifting to keep Keith out of Shiro’s line of sight. “If you want to survive long enough for it to become a reality, you’re better off counting what you have instead.” 

“Which part? I mean, it’s hard to look at the state of … everything and not feel like we’re chipping at a lost cause.” 

There were two simultaneous frustrated noises that had edges of growling, and Antok’s tail lashed behind him, barely a foot away from Keith. 

“We’re the ones that have been surviving a lost cause for centuries,” Kolivan grumbled. Antok put a hand on his shoulder, stepping forward; Keith quietly shadowed enough to stay out of sight - they were making a point to get Shiro to step away from Being In Charge for once, and it wasn’t a good point for him to remind Shiro he was there without disturbing that. He _could_ get Shiro out of it, but it was harder when Shiro had just shown reason to worry about him, and he didn’t want to break up the opening they’d gotten. 

“Ulaz was one of our _best._ ” Antok left that hanging for a moment. “That was part of why we were so frustrated by his decisions; he had reached, and held, a position _no one else_ had gotten close to without ending up dead or fleeing within a phoeb. At the time, all we had was that he’d gambled something it’d taken half a lifetime to reach on some prisoner that vanished almost immediately - and while it was clear that the Blue Lion and Voltron was taken out of Zarkon’s reach, we had no proof at the time that it was related at all to his actions. He gave up his life’s work and his _life_ believing you would be enough to finally turn the tide of our endless losing battle.” 

Shiro sank against the tree, looking down; Antok took another couple of steps closer, and Keith shifted quietly to use Kolivan to stay out of sight. 

Antok had been habitually harsh, but he did trust Antok to know what he was doing here.

“Considering where we are now and what we’re about to go do? _He was right._ ” Antok reached out to nudge Shiro’s shoulder, his hand engulfing it. Shiro flinched, still not looking up. “We _have_ been fighting for a lost cause. We’ve spent centuries knowing that for us to get rid of the Empire was nearly impossible; that all we could do was gather scraps, slow its expanse, and die with our pride. _You_ , your people, what you have and what you’ve done with it, turned this from an unwinnable fight to just a _difficult_ one.” 

Shiro shook his head, finally giving a shrug and looking up. “You know none of us ever had a concept of a war like this before we were drug into it.” 

“It’s hard not to notice.” Antok folded his arms, straightening his posture and shifting weight back. “I will pick you up and subject you to our entire history archive on the way to the battle if that’s what it takes for you to keep perspective.” 

That got a wince, and Shiro raising both hands, shaking his head. “No, no, I’m fine. Save your history for the one that’s actually got blood ties.” 

It was a quiet beat after that where he did shift to try to peer around Antok, suddenly remembering Keith was there. 

Antok stayed stubbornly put. “Are you sure?” 

“I - yes. Retirement plans on hold, not cancelled. Right?” 

Antok sighed with a quiet rumble, shaking his head as he stepped aside. Kolivan sidestepped as well; Keith was suddenly aware that Shiro was probably not going to forget having been worried when they’d walked in, and he didn’t have the excuse of making sure he wasn’t distracting from the two Blades getting Shiro to let go of Needing To Be In Charge for a few minutes now. 

Keith tried to look as innocent and uninvolved as possible. He barely heard Antok grumble something about “nowhere _near_ infiltration duty”. 

“So…how did this all come up?” 

He was both relieved and half terrified that Shiro was taking the indirect route and _not_ just directly calling him out on something bothering him. More delayed terrified than relieved, because it meant Shiro _would_ still manage to corner him on it.

“He came to us to ask if he would be welcome in our ranks after things were over, because he had nowhere else to go.” Kolivan’s narration was succinct, calm, and both of the Blades were keeping the tier of Calm and Detached that was a very blatant thin veneer over ‘there is an obvious problem here’. 

“Keith.” Shiro managed to sound simultaneously like he wanted to be comforting and wanted to shake Keith; he couldn’t quite tell if Shiro was trying to test limits on anything else, because Red had decided that was time to be a little loud prodding him and making it very clear she agreed that he was being stupid. 

He shrank in on himself a little, arms folded, the collar of his coat not nearly enough to hide behind. 

“I know how important this has been to you, but you know none of us would just forget you once things are over, right?” 

Kolivan and Antok were being statues, but Keith was still very aware of their presence, and pretty sure they were both watching him. Red was also not helping, digging back to dredge up a memory of Hunk saying something way back when they’d started about Lance’s family descending like locusts when they found out he didn’t have any family of his own. He still wasn’t sure if it was comforting or terrifying. 

“I-“

Well, Red was being pretty insistent, and Shiro actually looked hurt enough for him to feel more guilty about thinking they might than he did about accidentally sic’ing Kolivan and Antok on Shiro. 

“I’m trying.” He looked away again. “It’s - kind of easy to forget sometimes.” 

He caught, out of the corner of his eye, Shiro taking a moment to nod to the Blades, who both stepped back to give more space. Shiro walked over, tapping his shoulder lightly with the metal hand to get his attention, then tugged him over into a hug that he leaned into, going as boneless as he could without throwing Shiro off-balance. 

“You know I could use a hand re-adjusting to everything when this is over myself, right?” 

He nodded into Shiro’s shoulder. “Are you sure I’m the one that you want taking the lead on that?” Keith hadn’t really ever adjusted to things to begin with, at least not with human society; he didn’t know what Shiro’s plans might be eventually or if Shiro would want to stay on Earth or not. 

“I think you’d know what to look out for better than anybody else.” Shiro squeezed more, then let go, stepping back. “And I did mean it that I’m not going to just leave you as long as I have anything to say about it.” 

On the one hand, Keith could appreciate Shiro being honest and knowing better than to make promises when they were in a war zone where any of them could die - when they were going into a battle where any of them could die.

On the other hand, it was a sense of foreboding that didn’t entirely help ease his nerves.

He had almost forgotten they weren’t alone there.

“You know,” and Antok paused long enough for Keith to have his brief startle, “La Sai was going through things left behind by the occupation force, and had been setting some things aside for us as well as earmarked for sending off with the Castle in general. About three-quarters of it should agree with anything with similar biochemical metabolism.” 

Shiro was staring about as blankly as Keith was.

“I don’t think any of us are required to be up as early as the engineers. We could move back to one of the courtyard gardens for a while.” 

**********************

By the time they were settled, the sun had gone completely down; the only light came from the outside lights of the tower overhead and bioluminescent flowering vines woven through the garden trees and fences that seemed like new additions to the area. They were just enough to keep it from being uncomfortably dark. 

Not long after, the conversation had drifted less dire, into a round of stories of dumb stunts pulled around the Garrison and when the Blades were still in training; Keith’s habit of making unscripted low passes right by Iverson when they’d tapped him to fly in public exhibitions, the stuffed toy Shiro and Matt went back and forth stashing in increasingly ridiculous places for the other one to trip over that escalated to include simulation pods and Shiro’s flight gear, Kolivan and Antok having a back and forth booby-trapping each other’s things until they drug half their training group into it after the wrong person tripped one. 

There was also a realization a little too late that alcohol content skewed higher when the species of origin averaged at least twice the body mass of a human, and Keith had lean-draped against Shiro’s shoulder and side with zero inclination to move. Nobody had commented on bits of his childhood accent creeping back in, for once. 

He also failed to find motivation to warn Shiro that he’d just picked up the wrong bottle; Kolivan was the one that actually tried to move to warn him, almost too late.

Unfortunately for Keith’s revenge for incidents back at the Garrison and around the shack, it only took holding the open bottle a little too close for Shiro to realize his mistake, grimacing and pulling back with the bottle at arm’s length, blinking at the fumes.

Antok actually looked disappointed. Kolivan caught it, shaking his head with a sigh. 

And then he looked at Keith. “Hey, Keith-”

“Oh no y’don’t. I already know what it is.” He glared at the bottle. “If you want t’revive your old ‘hide ghost peppers in my food on off days’ game, you’re gonna have to actually _work_ for it.”

“I know La Sai set something aside for you. I think there was even a crate with a growth set.” Antok addressed it to Shiro, but was far too smug and not nearly drunk enough to’ve forgotten that Keith was right there, glaring at him now. 

“Shiro I can still make traps. Already owe you a few.” He still hadn’t forgotten his intentions of something happening to Shiro’s pillow and the rest of his room for backing up everyone else calling him cute.

Shiro smiled and ruffled his hair. “He’s cute when he’s annoyed.”

Keith shrank into a sulk with a weak attempt at a growl, and a more sullen growl when Antok laughed and Kolivan visibly stifled one.

It didn’t stop Shiro from retelling a few stories about Keith in the Garrison, starting with the dare about ghost peppers. 

Keith let him get through a couple of what Shiro’d managed to get over on him.

And then retaliated with ‘Getting Takashi Shirogane To Take Care Of Himself, The Saga’, starting with the month where Shiro tried to live off boxed macaroni and cheese.

He was about to shift to the confession of why coffee stopped working for Shiro to stay awake with when both Antok and Kolivan tensed, hands straying to weapons, scanning the area around them.

Shiro stiffened, and there was a quiet, high pitched warning hum, but the arm wasn’t active yet.

There had definitely been something scuffing behind the nearby bush, failing to avoid jarring branches a little too fast.

Keith was drunk, but not drunk enough to not make a guess and hope it wasn’t what he thought it was.

He sat up himself, ignoring the world wobbling a little. “Ralar? ‘Sthat you?” 

The bushes rustled again, and there was a small pair of yellow eyes, and the sound of another small voice hissing something in a whisper.

Shiro relaxed, letting his hand drop to the ground; the Blades relaxed their guard, with a confused look between her and Keith.

“Why are there children here?”, Kolivan asked, nodding towards Ralar; there was another pair of eyes in the dark a second later, then a third - all but the smallest of them had managed to sneak out. Torek was a mess of confusion, shooting half-betrayed looks at Keith now and then in between staring at Antok in disbelief. 

“Left behind when th’occupation left.” Keith had a hand on Shiro’s shoulder, trying to steady himself; it was a lousy time to be drunk.

Torek’s claws clenched in the bush enough to rattle the leaves more. “You’re Fleet Commander Antok?!” 

Antok stiffened, blinking, and then buried his face in one hand with a groan. “I haven’t been a _fleet commander_ in a long time, child.” He looked back up, leaning his elbows on folded knees and staring back pointedly. 

“You may as well all come out. The bush isn’t doing you much good anymore.” Kolivan waved for them to come out; they slunk around the bush to stop in a little cluster just the other side of Shiro, much closer to Kolivan than the Black Paladin. 

Shiro shrank down, looking away, and curled around the metal arm, putting his good hand over it. 

Ralar shifted from foot to foot, then bolted in front of Shiro, half-tripping to curl up on Keith’s other side; Keith put an arm around her, and finally gave up himself, leaning on Shiro for balance; she flinched a little, but didn’t move, staying put with Keith as a buffer.

Torek growled a little, but it mostly seemed aimed at Shiro and Keith. The younger one was fussing, worrying at his shirt with his claws, looking around the clearing uncertainly.

Kolivan turned a brief look to Antok.

Antok sighed. “You can relax. Nobody here is going to harm you, and if anyone _else_ tried, we’d _all_ be on them before they could get close.” Antok made a motion that very pointedly included the two paladins. 

Torek cast a suspicious glance their direction with an unhappy, small rumble, before his attention returned to Antok. “You’re supposed to be dead. How are you here? _Why_ are you here?”

“Well, rather obviously, I’m not dead. As for _why_ ,” he straightened, hands folded in front of him. “I can speak from personal experience that whatever you’ve been taught, whatever you’ve been told about Zarkon, he hasn’t been a _hero_ since before the Empire.” The word ‘hero’ was almost snarled, a faint growl under Antok’s breath.

Antok may not have been stationed near central command, but he was in a rank that had answered to Zarkon. Torek had frozen, mouth open, staring at him. Keith stayed quiet, letting Ralar try to burrow under his far-too-small jacket. 

“He’s a half-dead husk held together by some kind of fell magic that is obsessed with power and control, more than happy to play his commanders off one another if he thinks someone might get ambitious or even if he just thinks someone is showing ‘signs of weakness’ like too much interest in the well-being of the people under their command, or less willingness to throw lives away for no more gain than shows of force and blindly ‘proving loyalty’.” He paused; it had a second to sink in, and Torek began to bristle slightly, about to argue. “Think, child. You know how long Galra live. And I know you can’t have grown to this age without being taught some _discipline._ What are you doing when you lash out and attack anything that isn’t doing what you want?” 

Torek hung his head. “Being a coward who’s afraid they can’t handle their problems.”

“And Zarkon burns entire civilizations and every world they lived on - weaker ones, who wouldn’t fall to ash the second our attention falls on them if they _were_ capable of being a threat; they aren’t ‘examples’, either, because if that worked, no-one would ever raise a weapon against the Galra. So what can we even call it?” Antok leaned closer, eyes narrowing.

Torek shrank back; the younger child slunk closer to the bushes, curling up close to the ground next to them. Keith had his hands full with Ralar, petting the bristles of fur along the top of her head and trying to keep a quiet, steady stream of soothing muttering without much caring if it was anything that made sense; Shiro shifted, but didn’t move, not while Keith was leaning on him. 

It took Torek a few beats to find a retort, and it was thin, unhappy, and uneven. “Aren’t you working with _Altaeans_?!” 

Antok closed his eyes with a rumble. “Yes. And I have something I need you to listen to _very_ carefully. Before we knew there were any Altaeans still alive, our people - Galra historians, doing incredibly dangerous work - found fragments of old records, intact enough to verify that they were unaltered and to have something _very_ important in them.” 

Torek was turned half-away, but was listening, keeping absolutely still.

“Our homeworld was _dying_. It was tearing itself apart. The Altaean ships _evacuated_ our people. Zarkon has been _lying_ to us from the beginning; he _blamed_ his own allies so that we would rally to his banner and turn on them, to give him absolute power.” 

Red was paying attention, listening with a keen, cold focus; he knew there was some other memory here, a mass of betrayal and hurt and grief and misery, but she was curling flames around it, holding it out of his reach as something he shouldn’t be touching drunk or when he had a child to mind. Antok’s description wasn’t the whole story, but it was true and had the general outline and spirit of the truth, and all of it that was important at the moment.

Torek was staring at the ground with a pitchy, rusty-sounding whine; he turned and made it two steps to bolt before Kolivan caught him, stopping him and tugging him down.

“Child - child, breathe. Running away won’t change anything.” Kolivan stayed still; Torek only squirmed briefly, then went still, freezing where he was. “And if you brought the younger ones here, then you should be looking after them.” He nodded toward the youngest, half-hiding under the bushes, and Ralar, curled up clinging to Keith. 

Torek did follow it, and it was the first time he’d looked at Keith with anything other than hissing hatred; he sank back, going limp against Kolivan’s arm and almost burying his face, shame written across his fallen features. 

Antok sunk down, one hand on the ground, and his entire posture softened as he motioned to the smallest one to come out. “I know. Everything is frightening and wrong right now. No-one here will hurt you. You can come here.” 

Shiro tried to shrink, edging as much out of the way as he could while still supporting Keith leaning back against him. Ralar’s ear twitched at the shift in weight, but she just curled up on Keith’s lap more in response. 

The youngest one was watching, attention flicking between everything in the clearing, ears flattened, still curled under the bush. Antok gave another careful motion with one hand, and made some kind of quiet, low noise that reminded Keith of hearing ravens try to warble; it at least seemed to get their attention focused on him. 

He didn’t quite stand, but he crept a little closer, keeping to a low crouch, motioning again and putting his hand out.

The child bolted from hiding, burying themselves in his chest, and he sat back down next to Kolivan, curled around them protectively with occasional faint little rumbles, tail curled around with the tip ticking against his ankles.

“My family died in the fighting.” Torek’s voice was thin, faint, and muffled against Kolivan’s arm. “I’d been locked in a room in the city after the ships left…they weren’t going to give up like the commander did…”

Shiro didn’t move, but the knot of guilt was loud enough for Keith to notice, and make an entirely-not sober attempt at nudging back at it that included prodding Red to get Black involved. 

Kolivan shook his head slowly. “I know. That’s why we’re here - it won’t be fast, or easy, but we will put an end to the pointless deaths.” 

Ralar was the first one to calm down; at first she’d just settled enough to not be clinging as hard, then she sat up, and Keith caught her turning to say something to Torek, still too tense for it to be anything useful. He caught her shoulder, tugging back and shaking his head, not sure how he was managing to sit up straight for that long - it probably wouldn’t last.

She looked back with a sullen glare and all the unhappy tension he knew he’d had many times as a kid; it was actually a little painful, and he wasn’t sure how he managed to keep her attention there long enough to try to say anything. “It won’t help. Trust me. Give him time. It was hard for you too.” 

Her ears lowered, and she looked down, fidgeting, a couple of little unhappy almost-whines before she looked up and around again, watching Shiro sideways.

The guiltball wasn’t loud enough to be digging into Keith while they were out of the lions, but from the way Shiro was staring off into space, it was probably still there; Keith slipped a hand over to rest on his knee.

There was another tiny, unhappy rumble-whine from Ralar, and then she moved suddenly, sitting stiff in Shiro’s lap. 

Shiro startled, freezing, staring down in confusion, and gave Keith a helpless look, pleading for help. Keith almost laughed, finally giving into the way the world wanted to wobble and going back to leaning on him; Shiro rolled his eyes and put his good hand awkwardly on Ralar’s shoulder, resting the metal one on the ground after she tugged away from it a little. 

She did relax again after a few minutes, curling up against Shiro. Not long after that, Torek was at least less boneless, while Antok was carrying a bundle that might have been asleep. 

“We should get them back inside before the minders panic completely,” Kolivan said idly, “and we should get _some_ rest before we leave.” 

On the way back in, after Kolivan had gathered the half-empty bottles, Keith was stuck weaving all the way and finally just started using Shiro for support; Shiro wasn’t as drunk, but he definitely wasn’t sober, either. 

Keith did catch a small “I told you” from Ralar beside them that only got Torek shrinking down and edging a little closer behind Kolivan. 

Kolivan wasn’t far off; there were several Olkari hurrying around the central tower that only needed to catch sight of them to dart off after a moment of exasperated relief. By the time they reached the restricted area, word had apparently gotten there, but there were still four Olkari and three grown Galra that all looked like they’d had a few years shaved off their lives and would need time to rebuild their shattered nerves. 

And a few more years shaved off on the three Galra as there were varying levels of freezing, a couple words that probably shouldn’t have been said around children, and a couple large steps taken back from Antok in about the reaction most rational beings had to the apparent walking dead.

“This is why I don’t take the mask off,”, he grumbled, walking over to hand the smallest child to one of them; the kid stirred finally, and made to go to them before the other Galra’d even put together what was going on well enough to not awkwardly fumble with catching them. 

Torek slunk back toward the back rooms, and Ralar had already recovered enough to be acting like everything was normal, although that in and of itself was probably also a bit of razzing at the minders. 

The soldier that had surrendered to Lance still hadn’t moved by the time they left and split up toward their respective rooms. 

He knew Shiro had been guilting hard. He knew it was probably going to come back with a vengeance once Shiro was alone if he were left to his own devices.

So, Keith gave up on any pretense of trying to keep balance before they got near his room.

Shiro got the door open, and managed to walk him to the bed; Keith leaned in, clumsily hooking a foot around Shiro’s leg as he got close to trip him so they both ended up unceremoniously sprawled.

He wasn’t sure if Shiro had realized it was intentional when he fell, but after Keith took that as an opportunity to cling with as much determination as he mustered, Shiro gave him a dim look that made it clear he’d figured it out.

“Keith, come on. I have a room of my own.” He tried to stand up, not having much success with Keith doing his best octopus impression. 

“Mnn-nn. I know you too well. You go, you’re gonna brood all night, an’then we all get to deal with your nightmares, only worse’n usual.” 

“I will not-”, Shiro tried to protest; Keith growled, and chewed on the shoulder of his shirt, not budging.

Shiro groaned heavily, giving up on standing. “Can I at least get my shoes off - settle for the night.” 

“Only if you don’t try to leave.” He glared back at Shiro.

“I won’t try to leave.” He tugged, trying to sit up, and Keith didn’t budge; Shiro rolled his eyes. “I promise I _won’t try to leave_.” 

Keith finally let him go, but was almost keeping too much of a watch on him to remember to shrug off his own jacket, push his boots onto the floor, and shove the knife haphazardly under the pillows. As soon as Shiro seemed like he was about done, Keith flopped over on him, dragging him off-balance and curling up on him with a grumble.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from You Have Come To The Right Place by Sixx AM -   
> Sometimes you feel like giving up  
> Sometimes you've bled out enough  
> Sometimes you've got to believe in something  
> Cause you're not the only one, standing there losing blood  
> You have come to the right place


	31. Could there be another universe - one that wasn't always out to get you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith tries to get away from noise to nurse a hangover and finds Slav instead. 
> 
> Once the Castle is moving, Kolivan and Antok interrupt trying to burn energy in the training bay, and as the battle draws nearer, Keith makes an incredibly poorly timed attempt at talking to Allura.

Keith woke up with Regrets. 

Also feeling like he’d tried to hike three hours in the desert without water and with a headache that made existing miserable enough that Shiro nudging him awake got a grumbling groan and a faint growl. He did move, but it was to tug part of the bedding over his head to ward off the lights that’d come on and the flickers of sunlight coming in through the covered windows.

“Come on. We’ve got to get moving.” Shiro nudged his shoulder and tried to unravel his other arm, which should’ve been easy if Keith hadn’t been so insistent on Not Moving. 

Keith growled again, curling closer and dragging more of the blanket into the tangle. 

“Hey Keith.” Shiro was, at least, mercifully keeping his voice down. “If you let me go, I can get water. It’ll help with the headache.” 

Keith considered it, blearily, weighing the effort of moving and the loss of something larger and comforting to cling to against the knowledge that he probably did need water. It was a surprisingly difficult decision, particularly when the water option included movement. 

Shiro gave up on trying to disentangle, instead just edging awkwardly toward the edge of the bed, tugging Keith’s dead weight with. 

That added “ending up on the floor” to the not moving option, and that finally tipped the scales in favor of letting go and burrowing further into the blankets once Shiro was off the bed. 

He was trying to go back to sleep, which was proving incredibly difficult with the headache, when Shiro returned, setting something next to the bed; Keith wormed closer to the edge without relinquishing the blankets he’d burrowed into, sticking a hand out and feeling around for the large mug of water to pull back into the mass. 

Shiro gave a gentle pat to the blankets about where his head was, and earned an off-pitch whine.

“If you aren’t back with everyone when it gets closer to liftoff time, I’ll come back and get you, alright?” 

He wasn’t sure how Shiro was managing to sound relatively together.

No, he did have an idea; Shiro had a decent amount of weight on him, probably hadn’t drunk as much, and had a horrifying uncanny ability that had been honed to mastery to act like nothing was wrong. A hangover was probably nothing to play off at this point.

The water did help, some, although it only really took the edge off the headache. After a bit longer hiding in blankets, he dug around for his knife and crawled out of bed, reassembling himself as much as he felt up to, still a rumpled mess with nothing on quite straight.

He made it through the central tower okay, ignoring any of the Olkari that were around, and walked out the front door, eyes still half closed.

The sun was bright in the sky, and he recoiled back a step with a growling hiss at it. 

“Hey look, Sleeping Beauty’s finally awake!” Lance was far enough away at least to not merit death for volume. “Man, what party did I miss last night?” 

He managed to get his eyes open in the bright sunlight enough to glare at Lance with as much hatred as he could muster when he mostly just wanted to find some nice dark small space to hide in; Lance just laughed and went back to whatever conversation he’d been having over one of the crates that was being moved out to the Castle, while Hunk just shook his head. 

There were people coming and going from the castle with a lot of levitating lifts, storage crates, and noise; he gave up on going through all of it, slinking off. There were some shady, out of the way, hard to get to spots up on the giant Teludav, worth the effort to climb up to and just curl up under the curve of one of the giant claw-like main parts.

He closed his eyes and curled up sprawled under the arc of metal, the noise and bustle just distant enough to be muted.

And then there was movement somewhere up above him, a shift in the shade, and he tensed with a quiet whining growl, cracking an eyelid up.

Slav was on top of the curved part of the Teludav, peering over the edge down at him.

Keith regretted everything about not just braving the noise and crowd to get on the Castle; the ship was huge, there would’ve been plenty of hiding places well out of the path of anybody with no Slav.

He narrowed his eyes, staring up at Slav. 

Slav looked down, making some kind of thoughtful noise.

“Never _in any reality_ try to match a Galra drink for drink.” 

Slav vanished back over the metal arc, and for a few moments, Keith thought he might be left in peace.

Then there was the sound of something just around the corner of the metal a few feet away from his head opening for whatever last-minute adjustments Slav was doing. 

Maybe Slav would be busy enough to leave him and his hangover in peace.

That hope lasted for maybe two minutes before it was dashed.

He had gotten halfway into drowsing when it registered that some of the noise of Slav rustling around in the cables and paneling had settled down, and he cracked an eyelid to find Slav studying him, intent enough to be thoroughly unnerving.

“…What?”

He knew he was going to regret asking before the word had even left his mouth.

“You were raised on the same planet as the others.” It wasn’t said as a question; it had been obvious enough from previous exchanges and the dinner conversation the day before.

“…Yes?”

Slav gave a small, disapproving “Hmm” before ducking back into the machinery.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” There never really was a good time where he’d be okay with this, but now was a particularly bad one.

“Differences in applicable experience and training that diminishes your chances of survival and success by approximately 6.34% in realities where you were raised removed from the context of the larger inhabited universe.” Slav’s voice was muffled by the machinery. 

Definitely should’ve tried to duck through the gauntlet into the castle. He buried his face in his folded arms with a groan. He considered not looking up, but against his better judgment, he finally did. “Is it _really_ that big of a deal? I mean, where _else_ was I going to end up?”

“Well, there is an equal chance that you do not pass for your father’s species and end up raised elsewhere in the universe. Almost even, fifty-fifty.” Slav wasn’t even bothering pulling his head out of the machinery.

“So what. I grow up with the Blade in the other half?” His voice was dry and tired; if the Other Half Of His Family came from the Blade of Marmora, then ending up with them did seem like the easiest guess.

One of Slav’s lower hands motioned vaguely his direction with a tool, the alien’s entire upper body still buried in the Teludav. “Only in twenty percent of realities where you are not raised on the same homeworld as the others.” Slav passed the tool from hand to hand a second later, so that it vanished into the machine. “Likely due to the incredible distance between that planet and any world where it would be possible to make contact with the rest of the Blade of Marmora. In seventy percent of those realities, your background is that of a rebel or pirate opposed to the Empire. You likely do not want to hear about the last ten percent.” 

He rolled his eyes; his nightmares had done plenty for that. “Are those the ones where I end up working for the Empire?”

“Only in half of them. You do not even survive childhood in the other half. The Empire is prone to treating half-Galra very poorly.” Slav was carrying on as if it were a perfectly normal conversation to have, still half-buried in the Teludav’s innards. 

Keith wanted to believe that it was a part of whatever damage Slav carried from his imprisonment, except that Slav seemed lucid and about as calm as the inventor ever got. 

“If it is any consolation,” Slav continued, “You are apparently difficult to successfully recruit and maintain. Ninety-five percent of all realities where there is a recruitment attempt made when you were not raised within the Empire you turn on them, and… maybe thirty or forty percent of those where you are raised in the Empire?” Slav pulled his head out of the machinery, pausing to fuss at his whiskers and the fur on the side of his face in deep thought. “There is one specific variable impacting those realities, although that adds its own complications to definitions of ‘loyalties’ and not turning against them does not always mean not turning against Zarkon.” 

Keith wasn’t sure if he wanted to know, or if Slav would even notice if he did ask. The inventor stayed deep in thought, disturbed by something, for a good few minutes; seeing him standing straight like that was an odd reminder that Slav was taller than he was and at least similar in weight, something it was easy to forget with the way Slav usually moved. 

As for most of Slav’s tangent, Keith wasn’t really sure what to make of it; it was a strange jumble of mental images, and it took effort to not let his attention catch on the more unsettling ones. Slav’s talk of alternate universes was a deep rabbit hole he wasn’t sure he wanted to fall down. 

Slav eventually just shrugged with a faint noise, as if whatever it was can’t have been that important, and returned to whatever he’d been doing. 

It was mostly blissfully quiet for a while, the noise of Slav working on the Teludav fading into background noise; Keith half-dozed, eventually slowly dragging out of it into something closer to awake. 

Not long after he sat up, he caught a glimpse of black and white armor and black Blade armor heading towards the Teludav - Shiro and Kolivan, likely signaling time to go. 

***********************

There were times he just spent time in the training bay out of restlessness; needing to move, having too many things that couldn’t be solved and that he couldn’t do anything about. 

And at least, unlike the old WMA group, he didn’t need to worry about not beating the shit out of the Gladiator.

He’d been focused enough, and had it on a high enough setting, to not notice he wasn’t alone in the room until it shut off and he turned to the door to find the two Blade leaders standing by it, watching. 

At least, he hoped it was just being preoccupied, but they were the best on the ship right now at showing up out of nowhere. 

There was an awkward, self-conscious moment; they were definitely almost unnervingly thoughtful about it, and he knew he was still probably making up some deficit on training for both actual combat and dealing with things like low gravity that weren’t a factor in any of his practice on Earth. He had no idea how his martial arts training and recent patchwork experience held up against their standards.

“You’re definitely better at handling one on one,” Antok finally commented. “Not that multiple opponents on one is ever an ideal situation. What kind of training did you have?” 

He was caught off guard, unsure how to frame it, particularly when it hadn’t been realistically a live combat thing for most of it. “Swordsmanship is more of a sport and a - historical re-creation thing on Earth right now. The group I was with did try to work out how historical training worked when it was a military skill, but…” There was still that difference in intent. “I’ve been doing some training with Coran and Allura since coming here.” 

Most of that was focused on low or absent gravity and three dimensions, which he hadn’t had at all before. 

“Same principles, at least.” Antok tilted his head; Keith wasn’t sure what else had their attention.

“Was Shiro one of the ones who taught you?” 

He blinked, staring at Kolivan’s question blankly. Even knowing Shiro could clean the floor with him now, the most he had for the image of Shiro with a sword was a vague mention early on and the already shared pool of reflexes and muscle memory Voltron drew on where it was hard to tell who was a part of what sometimes. 

“There’s similar base methods between you.” 

Another blink; he knew Shiro didn’t have any experience with swords before he was taken that wasn’t Keith’a fault, but odds were the most they had on Shiro’s background would be whatever little had been documented of how he was caught. “Uh. Other way around.” 

They both gave him an echo of the stare he’d had a moment ago, even if only Kolivan’s was visible enough to be clearly readable. 

Whatever had been documented of how he was caught, and that bit Kythylian had warned them about where Shiro’s time in the arena was publicly known and not hard for them to have been aware of, even if they were politely leaving that part out. 

“He was a pacifist - used to hate conflict. Still does, kind of. He almost failed his early self defense classes at the Garrison, but he did tag along to some of my sword training, and we used to spar sometimes, though it was half goofing off?” Keith shrugged; now that he thought about it, it would be an odd contrast to someone on the outside. He looked away, ducking his head. “…I know some of it was broadcast. We were warned about it.” 

“You wouldn’t have known it at the time.” Antok leaned back on the wall, calmly level about it. “Really, it was an uncertainty when you both arrived on what we were dealing with; Ulaz had mentioned his certainty it was a gambit for Zarkon’s benefit, but I’m not sure it would be possible to clearly put across how much of a different person he is away from the arena.” 

“Yeah, I know… if he’d let on he was worried about anyone, they would’ve made it worse for everyone else.”

The two Galra shared a quiet, long look. 

“His adjustment period was very short, and he adapted impressively fast, moreso for someone that hated combat.” Kolivan was skirting sarcasm in the amount of level understatement he was doing. “There’s been volunteers who took longer to pull off grandstanding.” 

That was an image that didn’t work. “Shiro what?” 

“Did an excellent job of playing off ‘volunteering so that others would have to do less fighting’ in a manner that would not draw suspicion.” Antok wasn’t even trying to avoid sounding like there was a joke Keith wasn’t getting. 

It was still not an image he could get to work, even having caught Shiro snarling and angry during an actual fight. 

“He tried to bait Zarkon once, toward the end. Even Ulaz wasn’t sure if it was a genuine attempt at a challenge, a deathwish, or posturing to get Zarkon’s attention.” There was definitely something that had them both amused, and Keith wasn’t entirely sure what it was or how he should take it. “Called Zarkon a coward for making sport of the weak. He backed down when Zarkon asked if he was seriously challenging for the throne, but the attempt was made.” 

The turn of phrase was what got Keith starting to realize there might be more to whatever the Hell Shiro had been doing than they realized. Besides previously hating conflict to the point of pacifism, Shiro wasn’t nearly as prone to competitive posturing as some of the other top pilots; he’d usually been the calm, quiet one that would ignore bait knowing he could usually score circles around whoever was trying to drag him into a pissing match. Hell, he’d managed to short-circuit Keith’s own tendency to snap and try to get people to go away by that same pattern of just not reacting and continuing on as if nothing happened until Keith hadn’t known what to do with it anymore.

Swordfighting and grandstanding to draw attention were not things Shiro had ever been much for.

Keith, however, had a funny feeling he might be putting together what Shiro’d been doing to get by, suddenly dealing with an arena where the Galra would’ve made a point of throwing the weaker prisoners to the proverbial wolves if they’d suspected Shiro was not, in fact, just volunteering with vicious enthusiasm; Shiro would’ve needed to cobble together an entire show persona, one that went counter to all of his normal instincts, that the Galra would believe, on short notice with very little to work with. The fastest way to do that would be other points of reference that would make sense to Galra logic.

If Keith’s suspicion about one of his points of reference was right, then technically, while Shiro wouldn’t have known it at the time, it sort of was borrowing Galra logic. 

“Making sport of the weak and demanding obeisance while leaving others to do all the bloody work, as if a throne put him above all of it?” He didn’t even bother trying to put inflection behind the voice, he was too busy trying not to bury his head in his hands in disbelief.

There were a couple moments of silence. “…Close, although apparently he was fast enough on his feet to adjust it for context.” Kolivan was eying him with bemused interest, and Antok had shifted slightly, looking down.

Keith closed his eyes and buried his face in one hand with a groan. “Oh God, he seriously pulled the Black Knight routine in the _fucking arenas_ …”

“Oh, this sounds like a story.” Keith would’ve been upset with how entertained Kolivan sounded, if he weren’t pretty sure he’d have been laughing if it’d been almost anyone else himself. 

He pulled his hand down his face, straightening and trying not to let embarrassment creep through. “So the group I did sword training with was doing historical re-creation and martial arts. Some of them worked at this …… sort of fair that was like a mix of re-enactment and romanticized stories about a specific part of Earth’s history. They needed people who were competent enough with a sword for some of the shows to know what they were doing and not accidentally injure anyone, and I got talked into it.” And if Lance heard about this, he’d never hear the end of it. “Only I was horrible at dealing with people for any of the normal ‘knight’ roles, so there was some last-ditch attempt at letting me take over the antagonist role, and I … apparently did _really_ well at it.” 

Shiro still swore up and down that the “Dread Black Knight” was just Keith venting and reveling in not needing to mind any filters. It had ended up the only way they got him to stick around for the faires; he didn’t often admit it sober but he’d actually enjoyed it most of the time. 

He wasn’t sure how to even finish explaining what he suspected Shiro had done, although there was a funny, faint, breathless short hiss from Antok occasionally, and Kolivan just glanced sideways with a barely-there exasperated headshake. 

After an awkward moment, Keith fished out his phone, sifting through old videos and finding a time point. “Shiro’s the one holding the camera.” He held it up, pressing play.

And now that he was looking back on the absolutely shameless loud and angry grandstanding and posturing he’d done when they turned him loose in the black armor, he amended his earlier thought about Lance; nobody would let him live it down if they heard about it. 

After a few minutes of the ‘Dread Black Knight’ trying to bait some of the ‘King’s personal guard’ down onto the field, he stopped the video, putting his phone back.

“…He survived all of that on sport training and cobbling together an act based on what he saw of some of the other gladiators, random bits of improvisation, and borrowing parts of other people’s show acting routines.” Kolivan sounded unsure if he should be awed or laughing; Antok’s odd hissing had actually lapsed into badly-stifled laughter. 

“He got _Zarkon’s_ attention building from-“, Antok trailed off into laughter again.

Keith wasn’t sure how to take it. On the one hand, the whole thing did seem to have them impressed; on the other, it felt strange to be having a conversation like that about an entire year that’d been a harrowing ordeal for Shiro, the nightmares and lingering trauma still dogging Shiro more than Shiro ever tried to admit. 

He also was even less sure how to react to the discovery that Shiro had apparently yanked on his old Renfaire routine for a desperate, last-second template for trying to avoid the Galra realizing he was only volunteering to try to keep the weaker and more vulnerable out of the ring. 

He was about to consider it a small blessing that he had time to figure out how to process this without worrying about Shiro’s reactions when the door opened. 

Kolivan hadn’t reacted as obviously as Antok to begin with, and was back to a more normal schooled neutral before the door was even fully open. Antok’s laughter stifled down to the occasional odd hiss, and it was almost dead certain that he was abusing the mask covering his face.

Shiro stared between them and Keith, eyebrow raised, finally settling on Keith with the imploring look waiting for an answer.

“Uh.” Keith gave Kolivan and Antok a short, desperate look.

“Keith had just explained things that put new light on your talent for cunning and impressive ability to adapt.” Kolivan was very good at keeping diplomatic neutrality, even if he was noticeably bemused.

Antok was still in and out of the funny stifled hissing spurts that Keith knew now were trying not to laugh.

Shiro was getting increasingly confused, and the next ‘answers please’ look he shot Keith was tinged with suspicion.

Keith considered trying to explain there, but he wasn’t sure how Shiro would take it, and he wasn’t sure how Kolivan and Antok would handle Shiro if it did hit nerves badly, nevermind the low odds of Shiro actually talking around them. Just thinking about trying with them there made him feel tense and scratchy and stifle attempts at talking. 

“I was about to head out - we can talk on the way?” He nodded toward the door.

Shiro nodded, casting the Blades a last confused look before they walked out.

As they passed out the door, he could hear Kolivan grumble, “You are cheap and a cheat”, earning a quiet retort of “With the rank I held, I _earned_ my right to be lazy now” just as the door closed.

Keith waited until they’d put a hallway or two between them and the training bay before he looked up, not even sure where to start. Shiro was growing increasingly torn between suspicion and concern.

“It’s not - anything bad? They snuck in while I was training. Recognized bits of similarities in how we fight, and wanted to know if you’d taught me.” 

Shiro fought down a short bark of a bitter laugh at that. 

“Well - I didn’t really get to practice properly during that year, and you…” He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at the other side of the hallway, away from Shiro, leaving the awkward silence go for a couple seconds. “And, uh. If we ever get back to Earth.” About as he’d expected, Shiro’d gone silently pensive, the subject being skirted around still obvious even if Keith wasn’t naming it outright. “Do you want to take over the Dread Black Knight gig? You’re probably better at it than I am at this point.” 

Keith scraped out a lopsided, pained half-smile, the joke falling flat almost as soon as it started; Shiro just shot him a long-suffering unamused cat-on-tinfoil look. 

He raised his hands, taking a half-step away. “If they have anything recorded, I didn’t see it. I showed them one of the things you’d recorded back around the Faires and they confirmed it was a similar routine.” 

“It’s a little…” Shiro grimaced. “I don’t know. Getting reminded it was all recorded and broadcast because they’ve seen it…”

Keith shifted pace so that he could easily reach over and rest a hand on Shiro’s good shoulder. “Well, you impressed the Hell out of them after they heard about what you were like before and got enough to fill in what you did there.” 

The grimace softened, but it’d turned more queasy. “I’m not sure that’s any better.” 

Keith stopped, tugging gently; Shiro came to a stop, folding his arms, looking away. 

“Shiro, there _wasn’t_ a ‘good’ answer there, okay? And - you were doing the same thing the whole time, weren’t you? Volunteering so people who would’ve died got left in the cells and passed over, right?”

“That didn’t always work. Sometimes it just meant they got thrown in against me - and if you refused to fight…” Shiro trailed off, shifting weight like he was almost pulling away. 

Keith tugged, stepping in front of Shiro to catch the metal arm in his other hand. “Listen to me, Shiro. _You did the best you could._ ” He stared up at Shiro, standing straight, and leaning to make it harder for Shiro to avoid looking at him. “There was. No. Good. Answer. I know you know what would’ve happened if you _hadn’t_ done what you did, alright? You did the best you could in a bad situation, you survived, and now you have a chance to make sure it _stops_ happening.” 

Shiro was still trying to not look at him, guilt more visible in among the nausea, and made an unhappy noise in response. 

“Damnit, Shiro, look at me - would you _really_ do anything different and give up the chance to actually do something about all of this?” Keith dug his fingers into Shiro’s good arm, trying to draw Shiro’s attention.

There was a definite unsaid selfish side to it - Shiro giving up would’ve meant Shiro never would’ve come back, and even now that he was starting to adjust to the idea that maybe there were other people that actually cared about him, Keith wasn’t sure he’d survive that. He knew it was selfish, that Shiro had to be at least trying to cobble together something of his own life and own goals to live for, but it didn’t remove the nagging, dragging voice of ‘not worth coming back for’.

He was trying to shove it down harder; Shiro had enough to deal with right now without his problems, and Shiro had been through far, far worse than he ever had - Shiro needed the help and support more than he did.

Red rumbled in the back of his head, a warm presence pressing in and seeping through. 

Shiro did, finally, look at him, even if he was far more worn and miserable than he ever let himself be around anyone else. “Do you really think a lot of people are going to want me to be the one saving them after that?”

“Well, you certainly have no problem defending Ulaz’s right to be respected for the good that he did, and you have _some_ idea of what he had to do to get where he was.” 

That moment they were both suddenly on other sides of the hallway, Keith darting between Shiro and the direction of the voice, while there was the sudden hum of Shiro’s arm activating. Keith hadn’t noticed anything to betray Antok’s presence until he’d spoken, and somehow, Antok had gotten maybe ten feet behind Shiro while they were talking, with Kolivan right behind him. 

“There wasn’t really a ‘good’ way to step in without startling you, but we had guessed that this wasn’t something to leave the young one handling alone,” Kolivan added drily, motioning to indicate Keith. 

Nothing their size had any right to be that good at appearing out of nowhere. Keith was still working on getting his heartrate to go down, and his bayard had summoned, held up in guard in front of him; he could catch flickers of violet light from the corner of his eye where Shiro was similarly rattled. 

“Be honest. Would either of you have actually sought anyone else out over this?” Antok gestured at them, and the giant ball of tension and rattled nerves they’d turned into. 

Keith didn’t bother answering; Antok was probably right, and besides, he was a little busy calming down. He did hear an awkward trailing “Uh….,” from Shiro behind him. He took a couple breaths that he had to force to be slow and deliberate, then let go of the bayard, dismissing it and letting it deactivate. 

He hadn’t actually realized he _could_ summon it when he was out of armor, or thought too hard about where it went when it vanished. 

“Neither of you were really trained or prepared for this, were you.” Kolivan had his arms folded, one clawed finger tapping his forearm.

Keith stepped back half a step, straightening out of guard posture and finding a spot on the wall fascinating. 

“It’s far from an insult. But, if you want to continue to do well and survive, you are both going to need to learn to deal with what you’re going through and find what support and stability you can, before you break yourselves on this war.” Kolivan’s pointed look moved between both of them; there was a tiny, quiet bitter not-laugh from Shiro that got Kolivan turning it right back to him. 

Keith was briefly torn between a sudden spike of protective twitch, like he should get in the way while Shiro was uncomfortable, and knowing better - Kolivan was saying something he’d been trying to fumble at getting through to Shiro or getting Shiro to do since the pod had crashed in the desert almost.

He sidestepped, not giving Shiro the cover, and didn’t need to look to feel the short betrayed look Shiro gave the back of his head. 

“I’m fine, really.” Shiro’s voice wobbled, not cooperating any more than Keith was.

Kolivan raised an eyebrow, unimpressed. “You manage to cover things very well, but we aren’t blind, or deaf.” 

Shiro’s next recourse was half-sarcasm. “…No offense, but I really hadn’t pegged you guys as being that concerned with mental health.” 

“And what do you think happens if a spy has a breakdown while they’re in the middle of the Imperial hierarchy?” Antok’s tail had started ticking back and forth. “If you don’t go into it prepared to hold yourself together - and not just spend years ‘pretending everything is fine’ and hoping it doesn’t overflow at an _inconvenient_ time - you’re going to die, and you’re going to get others killed in the process.” 

It may not have been incredibly comforting wording, but it did make sense and raise questions about just how much of a mess they all looked like to the Blade, who’d had to plan and train for survival against ridiculously horrible odds for centuries. Shiro made a small uncomfortable noise behind him, and the violet light faded, the faint ominous hum finally cutting out. 

“So. What are we really supposed to do here?” Shiro was leaning on the wall, trying to act like he hadn’t just been startled into near-panic mode, and wasn’t doing very well at it. 

Kolivan looked between the two of them; Antok’s mask continued to be an easy cheat, but the way his tail was ticking, Keith suspected they were getting two of the same weary exasperated expressions. 

“You have _some_ luxury of time. Trying to pretend something never happened does not make it go away.” Kolivan gave Shiro a pointed look. “And neither does being careless of it clouding your perceptions and judgment.” The pointed look moved to Keith, who took a half step back, looking down.

“You should be listening to him more at times like this.” Antok’s attention hadn’t moved much off of Shiro, but he did gesture to Keith. 

Shiro followed the gesture, and almost looked like he wanted to argue for a bare flicker that was quickly eaten by glancing away in guilt, running the mechanical hand through his hair. “I’m trying.”

Keith paused, caught awkwardly off-guard. It wasn’t that he didn’t know Shiro needed the help, because that’d been obvious since the first few days they’d been in the Castle, when he’d had to go find Shiro for meals because he’d wake up disoriented and losing track of the fact that he could, in fact, open the door and leave his room on his own. 

As time went on some of it had blunted; some things that would’ve caused a full freeze and flashback now just left him off-balance, on edge and looking queasy for a few hours, there were longer periods where there weren’t frequent little tells that he was burying some bad reaction, more of his confidence felt like it was genuine rather than something held together with duct tape and bubblegum driven by desperate screaming survival instinct. 

Shiro hated admitting that he wasn’t okay; Keith had caught enough bits and pieces over the relay to know that Shiro hated that it happened, hated that sometimes as little as a photo of an old cave painting on Keith’s tablet could drag him back to the arenas, that Shiro really was prone to wanting so desperately to not have it affect him that he _did_ try to pretend it wasn’t there as much as he could, as if acting like everything was okay would somehow cause it to _be_ okay. 

What caught Keith off guard was that he’d never thought he was doing that much; his little efforts at trying to shore Shiro up and run along behind his heels like a dog in a service vest always felt like too little, too late, with no clue what he was doing, fumbling at a sucking chest wound with nothing more than scotch tape.

And now Antok was nudging Shiro over it and Shiro was admitting that it _did_ mean something. 

Antok had paused after that, although there was a moment where even through the mask Keith could feel the older Blade’s attention settle on him. “Really at this point you should both have _some_ idea of when you should be listening to someone _else_ and who you can _trust_ for it so that you’re not drowning in whatever is bleeding in your own skull… and to take what time you get to seek that out instead of making someone else drag it out of you or waiting for something to tear it open too far for you to hide it.” 

Shiro gave an awkward shift next to him, glancing around anywhere but at Keith or the two Blade. Keith wasn’t much better off; he knew Antok and Kolivan were speaking from long experience and a great deal of history, but it didn’t really lessen the urge to somehow argue or feel more cornered at the implication.

Or just lost and like hiding more - he was slowly getting to where it was easier to talk to the others, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want to find some high maintenance compartment in one of the taller rooms to hide in at the thought of seeking out Hunk or ~~Allura~~ Coran with half of the things that came up bothering him. 

He was lost in thought enough to almost miss that there were a few faint movements - a glance here, a shift of weight there - where there was, again, the impression there’d been some silent brief exchange between Kolivan and Antok that neither of them were party to.

“At least try to start seeing to yourselves as well as you would see to your ship and equipment,” Kolivan finally added. “This is a war where there isn’t enough chance for rest and recovery, so any stray moments must be hoarded.” 

Shiro gave a small, sharp nod. “…I’ll try.” 

Both of their attention on Keith was noticeable again; he almost flinched - going looking for Shiro he could try to do, but he still wasn’t sure how to approach anyone else, short of volunteering to help Hunk with repairs or some kind of weird indirect awkward attempt at asking if Pidge had found anything new in the old server blades or her other search as an excuse to be there. 

Before his heritage had come out, he would’ve added seeking Allura out to spar and get lessons on low-gravity, but even the ‘pretense’ wasn’t likely to go anywhere anymore. He knew he probably could go to Coran, but that was still jammed in the awkward place between knowing Coran was safe and all of his past reflexes and bad experience screaming ‘trap’ about any kind of older vague authority figure.

He wasn’t really sure how Kolivan and Antok weren’t tripping that, other than that they were very different in approach from the Altaean or any of the human social workers and others he’d dealt with, nevermind that somehow the entire process where he’d hard-earned a place and been acknowledged felt more solid than just blundering into the Castle and being ‘chosen’.

Red was definitely still paying attention, but it was the kind of exasperated ‘humoring’ where he knew she was almost wanting to prod at his snarls but was staying quiet to give him room to tease it less tight-knotted himself. 

They didn’t comment on his hesitation even if Shiro was giving him a worried side glance, and he wasn’t sure how to take it besides the odd sense that it wasn’t actually over, just being left alone for now. 

“This isn’t a condemnation, by the way - warnings are better given early enough to never be truly needed.” Antok half-turned to leave, stopping midway to visibly focus on Keith. “And feel free to remind him what Ulaz’s cover work was whenever he starts picking on himself over the arenas.” 

Kolivan followed after as he left; whatever the silent exchange had been, they had apparently finished what they’d meant to do. 

There was a thick silence that hung well after they’d vanished back around the corner. Keith finally looked over at Shiro, eyes narrowing.

Shiro looked away nervously. “I get it. Seriously. I get it. Point made.” 

***************

He wasn’t sure if it was a good idea or not and Red wasn’t either, but he went looking for Allura.

Most of his reflex was that it was an awful idea; she’d made it pretty clear what she thought of him now, and he wasn’t even sure if killing Zarkon would salvage that. 

There was still some tiny part of him that wanted to believe that Hunk was right; that maybe he wasn’t losing one of the few friends he had to something beyond his control, that maybe she might listen after she had time to adjust.

And a tiny little pessimistic part of him that was terrified of the idea that they might not make it. He didn’t want to die with the last memory of her being snide jabs and cold glares. 

He took Plachu sitting outside a door on a lower level as a sign he was going the right way. The mouse looked up at him and froze, whiskers twitching. 

“Oh come on. I thought you guys _didn’t_ hate me.”

Plachu shook his head vehemently - then ran up to push on Keith’s shoe, as if to move him back the way he’d come from. 

He’d found the right door, and the mouse was trying to herd him away from Allura. “I know. She’s mad at me, and I know she needs time, but - I may not _have_ time, and I can’t leave things like this.” 

Plachu made an exasperated noise, looking up at him with a flurry of squeaking that meant absolutely nothing to him.

“I still can’t understand you guys.”

The mouse somehow managed an oddly human facepalm, and then began dancing around his feet, gesturing and trying to mimic noises; some of it didn’t make sense, some of it he could pick out as gunfire and someone with some kind of weapon where he was having a hard time following the movements to tell what it was supposed to be - Plachu attempting to do a one-mouse re-enactment of some kind of battle, with one armed person apparently carving through a number of others and then doing an overdramatic collapse.

“Something happened here?” 

Plachu paused, nodding emphatically. There was a sudden recognition from Red - a memory of running down the same hallway in a breathless panic as if the world were spun glass teetering on the edge of a cliff, chest tight with overwhelming grief that hadn’t quite made impact, following a trail of corpses, the sound of lighter footsteps behind - “ _Allura, stay in the hallway-_ ”.

And then the door opened.

It was the least together he’d seen Allura since right after the destruction of her father’s hologram, hair mussed, with dark damp marks up and down her sleeves. 

Everything paused for a moment, Allura in the doorway looking lost and distantly alarmed, while Keith was frozen, caught between the present and realizing Plachu had been trying to warn him that he’d picked the _worst_ possible time to try to talk to Allura and a memory of sudden grief and loss that wasn’t even his. 

And then his feet were off the ground for a moment before his back hit the wall with Allura’s hands balled up in the front of his jacket and shirt.

“ _You-_ ”, she trailed off, her voice pitchy and broken. “What are _you_ doing here?!” 

He had his eyes closed, trying to shrink away as much as he could when she had him pinned to the wall. “I just - before we go, I wanted to -” Any thought he’d had about what he wanted to say had vanished into a narrow vortex, drug under, pointless next to trying to remember how to breathe and everything in his head scattering in incoherent little fragments; he wanted to run, but there wasn’t any chance of getting lose. 

“Wanted to _what_?” 

Her voice was still broken, uneven, hoarse in places, but it was still a tone that hit five or six old nerves and drug back memory of being much smaller and wadded in a corner or back shelf of a closet with his blood relatives; for a few seconds he was mouthing fragments with nothing coming out, trying to force his voice to work in the face of the demand to say _something_. “Try to - talk to you before we go.” He was forcing himself to breathe, to grab onto the massive presence of living fire that was keeping a solemn silence and leaning into him. 

“Oh _now_ you’re going to talk to me?! After spending _all this time_ -” He could feel her grip tighten on his jacket. “ _How long did you know?!_ How long did you know and not tell me?!” Her bristling had cracked into something familiar from a different direction, something tinged with fear and hurt that just drug the panic into sinking guilt; he _had_ avoided saying anything to anyone - had been terrified to say anything since that first fight with Zarkon.

“I didn’t - Zarkon told me when we were trying to save you, I didn’t want to believe him, I wasn’t sure until Ulaz…” It still came out in a fast jumble, almost tripping over words, still keeping his eyes closed, shifting and squirming to do everything he could to avoid looking at her. 

Ulaz’s sword, and the symbol he’d been carrying all his life. 

“What about Ulaz? What did he tell you?” Bristling to hide panic - Zarkon had been the last Galra she’d trusted, accepted, and he’d taken everything away from her. 

“He didn’t - I saw his sword, and -” He had his with him, had figured out how to get it dormant and back to the smaller knife on his belt, but he knew better than to move for it. “Same symbol as my knife - it might’ve been my mother’s…” He was fumbling; back to grasping at any straw that maybe he could at least get to where she didn’t hate him, even though he knew how much she was carrying, how many nerves he was running over just by existing in her space. “I didn’t mean to -”

He couldn’t finish the sentence; he wasn’t even sure what the rest of it was supposed to be. 

“Didn’t mean to what?” She lifted him just barely off the ground; all it would take was her being careless and he’d have broken bones to deal with, but even while she was shaking, she had stopped at just enough to hold him in place. 

Knowing that she was making some effort to restrain her own reaction - and what he’d walked in on - didn’t stop it from spiking the panic back hard enough for nothing to work to answer; there was a very quiet metally rasp like an unoiled hinge from somewhere in his chest that hadn’t happened since before they’d found Blue. 

It mostly covered the sound of squeaking from the ground, he wasn’t sure if it was his own distress or something else.

Her grip relaxed enough for his feet to be solidly on the ground again. Her voice was still shaking to match the rest of her, but there was a more noticeable fight for restraint. “Why didn’t you tell me.” 

He shook his head; he still wasn’t managing to make anything work to talk.

“Keith look at me - why did you _lie_ to me?!” 

He swallowed hard, and forced himself to look up, even if he didn’t manage to hold eye contact for more than a brief moment; even with the bright lighting, her glowing inner pupils were blown wide, hurt and anger and fear written everywhere through the frayed bits of her normal decorum. 

“Because-” He almost froze, had to look away again. “I was afraid - of how you’d react.” 

He leaned his head back against the wall, his chest full of steel wool and fumes, half-limp in spite of the tension.

He heard Allura take a few deep, uneven breaths before she let go and stepped back, pausing before hurrying out of the room, back the way she came - the closest elevator was on the other side of the room she’d just come from.

Once the door closed behind her, he slid down the wall to sit, pulling his knees up to his chest and burying his face there, Red trying to wind bits of flame through the jarred mess in his head. 

She still hated him, there was nothing he could do about it. He wasn’t sure how long he was left without much more ability to fend off some of the worse things clawing out of his mind than leaning against Red’s rumbling in his head like some kind of bizarre security blanket; that this was how it always went, that this was why he’d stopped trying, that he’d always be the weird werewolf kid and the monster nobody really wanted, that now he _knew_ he’d _always_ really been the monster everyone had always said he was, that the only reason anyone besides Shiro ever tolerated him was how much he could make himself useful. 

He didn’t notice he wasn’t alone in the hallway until Lance’s voice startled him out of it.

“…Keith?”

Lance sounded confused and worried; he startled, head snapping up, skidding back away against the wall a little in brief, renewed panic. Lance _looked_ worried, and more than a little alarmed, with Hunk serious behind him. 

“Are you okay? What happened?” Lance moved to kneel down a little to the side of his knees, giving what was supposed to be enough space to not be crowding - Keith knew Lance wasn’t really that close, but still found himself fighting the impulse to edge further away and give more space. 

He was finding it hard to make words again, the old lockup and a few more ugly old relics rattling - saying something made it worse before anything got better. He finally just managed a vague, short gesture raising one hand and forcing out, “Allura”, a hazy motion off away from him the direction she’d gone.

Lance blinked, expression going oddly blank; it was almost like there was a loading screen for a few seconds.

Then something sharper and focused crossed his face, and he stood up, turning on one heel. Keith froze, straightening, suddenly aware that he really had just made everything worse. 

Alarm crossed Hunk’s face as his arm snapped out, grabbing the back of Lance’s jacket and picking him up off the ground in the middle of stalking off; Lance’s feet circled in the air uselessly for a couple would-be steps as he motioned at the door as if he could claw it closer, hissing through his teeth. “ _Hunk let go of me._ ”

Hunk shook his head sharply. “No no no - I get it, I do, but this is _not the time for it_ , and you need to cool it and save this for _after_ the whole save-the-universe life or death fight with _Zarkon who has kicked our asses every time we’ve seen him before_!” 

Lance had stopped trying to squirm loose, mostly, but twisted to try to look back. “That’s why I need to do this _now_ , Hunk! You know, the thing where we could _all die tomorrow_ and she’s still - hissing and spitting at him and Kolivan and Antok?! _Especially_ him! He’s been here as long as the rest of us, and he never did anything to her!”

“Lance, _stop_.” He buried his head in his hands. “Hunk’s right. If we start a fight like this right before-”

“You of all people are just gonna let this go?! Zarkon almost _killed_ you once already!” 

Lance was ready to march off to pick a fight with Allura on his behalf, and he wasn’t sure what to do with that knowledge besides just stare up blank and awkward, somehow feeling all the more small and vulnerable for it; Red was purring, pushing him at the realization as something he needed to not forget. 

“It’s -” He shook his head, trying to clear it. “I know why she’s like this, it’s not - yelling at her won’t make it go away.” He curled in, face half-hidden back behind his knees and folded arms; Lance stopped his occasional tests, focusing on Keith, and Hunk cautiously lowered him so that his feet were on the ground again, if not letting go of the back of his jacket. “Zarkon was part of her family. She trusted him, and now she has _nothing left_ because of him and the Galra under his command.” 

“And you’re not one of them.” Lance folded his arms; he’d gone quieter than usual, with a stubborn set to it. 

Keith wrinkled his nose, grimacing into his wrists; there were a lot of things he still really didn’t want to talk about with Lance tangled up in this. “Do you really think it’s _that_ easy to relax after getting hurt like that?” 

Lance was narrowing his eyes, studying Keith again unhappily.

“Besides, I caught her at a really bad time.” There was a moment where he hoped that’d be enough, but he knew better than to think Lance would accept that, so he continued, “…her mother died in that room - fighting with the Galra before Allura was put in cryo.” 

Red had pulled back the memory, but it wasn’t so easy to banish the sheer, shattering weight of grief and fear that’d been attached to it. 

Lance’s face crumpled in pure frustration as he processed that, making an incoherent noise in the back of his throat before he finally just threw his hands up and turned to sit down heavily next to Keith, arms draped over his knees, muttering bits of profanity in Spanish. 

Hunk let out a breath of relief and sat down on Keith’s other side; it was a surprising vote of confidence in Lance’s temper having passed, but if anybody would know whether or not it was safe to stop watching for Lance storming off to pick a fight with Allura, it’d be Hunk. 

The next thing from Lance that Keith understood was a very put-out “why is this all a mess”.

“Because Zarkon is an asshole,” Hunk answered simply, as if it should explain everything. The sad part was that it kind of did; Zarkon _was_ responsible for what the Galra had become and most of Allura’s trauma that she was still struggling to deal with. Keith startled when Hunk’s hand settled on his shoulder, nerves still raw. 

“What does any of that have to do with you, though? You didn’t even know you _were_ Galra growing up, and you had nothing to do with any of it.” Lance’s hands moving jarred nerves again a little, although keeping attention turned that way helped.

“Because it wasn’t just Zarkon, it was all the Galra she knew that followed him, and it was all people she’d grown up with that she _thought_ she could trust.” Keith wasn’t any less frustrated as the shock was settling, but there was no actual direction to aim it. He hated being the target for it, but it was too familiar for him to manage any anger at Allura.

Normally he would’ve been more intent on avoiding saying anything about things Allura very pointedly didn’t want to talk about, but leaving Lance without any sense of explanation or idea of what that _meant_ seemed like the more dangerous option here, and Lance was doing that strange listening thing he’d picked up the habit of lately.

Even if he was visibly unhappy with all of it. “At least this makes sense to _someone_ here.” 

There was a moment where something in Lance’s expression caught the uneasy, uncertain edges of nerves; a flicker where Lance was doing the studying thing again, actually _thinking_ and trying to line up the edges of jumbled pieces. “You know it’s still kinda …” Lance paused with a headshake, fumbling with words. “I’ve never seen you just roll over and take it when someone was taking shots at you before.” 

Keith sank into his knees and folded arms a little more; actually talking to Lance without it blowing up was still new and strange, and he was far from ready to get into how he had an idea what this must’ve been like for Allura. “I know why she’s like this, and what Zarkon and the others did doesn’t just go away.” 

Lance watched him for a couple seconds, oddly serious, and then just sank against the wall next to him with another quiet, frustrated noise. Hunk squeezed his shoulder carefully, and when he didn’t flinch, Hunk edged a little bit closer, moving his arm so that it was draped over Keith’s shoulder. 

They stayed there for a while, the hallway silent, until Hunk finally declared that they should try to get something to eat before they had to go deal with Zarkon again; Keith was pretty sure that if he hadn’t stood up on his own, Hunk probably would’ve just not let go and carried him with.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title for chapter is from Undefeated by Incubus.
> 
> I'm pretty sure everyone can guess who the "specific variable" is in Slav's rambling, and that ramble has more than one plot bunny that will be upcoming later. (Slav _was_ working with the Blade and aware of their intel before he got captured, after all.)
> 
> I am going to be starting to post the side one-shots from other PoV's soon; there's a decent handful planned, and one will be the aftermath of the Allura scene from her side. She is absolutely not handling any of this well at all, but Keith isn't wrong about it being a mess that's coming mostly from trauma. 
> 
> I also make no apologies for the pacing here because we all know what's coming.
> 
>  
> 
> (and for an educational note: there is a reason for the thing with Kolivan and Antok going "oh god you are doing jack and shit to keep yourselves together mentally WHY"/that being a thing the Blade have as a survival bit! What actually got psychology moving from "purely theoretical and not a useful science" to clinical psychology/applied psychology in the US was actually the military - a mix of hiring psychologists to help with sorting recruitment/aptitudes, and hiring early clinical psychologists to deal with all of the various problems troops were coming back with, around WWI and WWII. WWI alone pretty much drove founding clinical psychology in the US, and legitimized it a lot for iirc both the US and Europe.)


	32. What Was The Price Of Those Shadows, Brother?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The last battle comes with confidence and some weights lifted, enough for a sense that maybe things will get better.
> 
> Then there's getting hit in the face with a planetkiller, the tangle of dragging back from the brink dragging Keith through Alfor's memory, and the immediate aftermath of everything sinking in with exhaustion, shock, and new trauma.

Allura had turned and started to leave the hangar, but she stopped and turned back as the cockpit closed, watching from near the door while he ran through the quick pre-flight checks. 

It was the worst weight lifted going in, even though it felt like it’d been something wedged in last-minute, a short raincheck on a longer conversation that needed to happen sometime. She didn’t hate him, and that would have to be enough for this; he was almost as afraid of actually trying to talk to her better as he was of facing Zarkon again, but it was already guaranteed to be better than last time. 

Everything he’d been afraid of had happened and passed, there wasn’t anything now to worry about except awkwardness, not being sure how to approach any of it, and the eternal nagging fear that he’d manage to screw up and drive her off even when he didn’t want to. They had a solid plan going in where they couldn’t treat defeat as an option; either they’d manage to kill Zarkon here, or he’d turn their trap around on them and it’d be the end of them.

They couldn’t afford failure, and Zarkon’s death would at least cause enough confusion to buy them some time to breathe and deal with other things; he’d relax when they were all back at the Castle, and everything else including sorting things out past “I don’t hate you” apologies could wait until then, when they had their victory and the time to prepare. He could trust everyone else to have their positions, and needed to trust that; they were all relying on him to finish Thace’s mission. 

He had the maps of the massive command ship, had gone over the routes to the central computers, even run a couple quick VR sims of it as they were getting into position to get the path down. Everyone else was en route to position. 

His last check wasn’t with the pod, it was with Red; the lion was grimly confident. The odds of him being able to either steal a Galra ship or get back to the pod after the sabotage run were ridiculous; his fastest and most reliable escape route would be out an airlock or external bulkhead, letting Red come get him. She was ready and aware of the plan, and would be there to get him. 

He took a last deep breath, looking back over his shoulder to Allura by the door, and gave her a thumbs up before he started the sequence to launch the pod. She returned it, hesitantly and worried, and then half-bowed as she turned to leave the hangar. 

They couldn’t afford to lose, and failure wasn’t an option.

************************************

The flicker before the strange magic-based planetkiller made impact was fast enough that he wasn’t sure how he registered the order of it, but he did know the path the too-late warning had taken, shared awareness spiking up an internal alarm of dread that was only a brief moment’s worth, not even enough time to brace for impact.

Green’s sensors to Pidge as part of the entire conglomerate being, something vast and dark and wrong and utterly unexpected incoming too fast to avoid. 

Then there was screaming and concrete sensation to attach to the phrase ‘having your soul ripped out’, blind agony echoed by Red even as the Lion was digging claws in and yanking back hard on him, trying to keep it from completely tearing him away.

Then there was nothing, and no way to tell how long the nothing stretched on for before something drifted out of it. 

“We’ve been having strange energy spikes; it’s shorted out the workbay computers twice and we have three technicians in the infirmary with burns from attempting to go near it for repairs today.” 

“Have you been able to tell what triggered them?” 

Light flickering past - a window in a darker elevator looking out over large and brightly lit space. Coran was next to him, looking out into the large room in consternation as he reported.

“Not at all. We were working on the internal mechanisms as usual, and then it just - started getting testy.” 

The elevator stopped, and he stepped out, Coran behind him, his wife at his side; Trigel was trailing behind, stepping away to check sensor readouts. 

There were large scaffolds and cabling around giant half-built bodies, mechanical innards that looked more like some artist’s technopunk fever dream of a living thing than machinery parts half-constructed within. He wasn’t paying much attention to four of the five, as he walked with purpose to one in particular. The others were fine, his attention was needed on the one having trouble. 

There were scorch marks on the floor from the “strange power surges”, occasional arcs of red-gold that spit erratically around the great red husk, turning to flames where the floor and other solid objects got in their way; the lights flickered, and the patterns of power squirming around it were thick and almost tangible. 

Honerva was keeping watch nearby with a couple of computer panels open; Zarkon was standing beside her, a hand on her shoulder. She was calmly looking between her monitoring and the end of the room where the disturbance was, while his attention was entirely focused on it with an expression of fixated mild horror. 

“I’d be careful walking over there - we had another injury just approaching it; the power surges have gotten worse.” Her tone was almost nonchalant. 

It didn’t feel like it was random, now that he was closer; it felt like the creature was struggling. “Don’t worry, Honerva, I’ll be careful.” A pause. “I do appreciate you taking time out of your work to help with this.”

The Altaean woman gave a quiet snort and rolled her eyes. “Honestly, after hearing your aides talk about how often you trail off dumbly when they ask what something they’re building is supposed to _do_ , and how often the word ‘possessed’ gets thrown around? I’m amazed you’re allowed to work on this unsupervised.” 

“Don’t worry, he isn’t.” Liastra patted his forearm before lacing fingers with his on the right side. “Coran and I are making sure he’s taking care of himself and not getting in over his head.” 

“Good thing someone can stay here for that,” Zarkon grumbled, not taking his eyes off the arcs of flame in front of them. 

He had already started to focus on the energy patterns; it was almost like ragged breathing, if exhales came with the echoes of a firestorm, and watching it was enough to feel an ache…

“Wait. It feels familiar, doesn't it? Like the Balmera after that meteor strike.” 

Liastra stepped forward, letting go of his hand, reaching out to trail the edges of the disturbance. “…It does, but I think this is much more dangerous than a wounded Balmera.”

“Well, of course; it’s a very different sort of creature.” He’d suspected there was something alive to it almost since it’d hit, but whatever was there had been half-dead and so chaotically disoriented it’d been hard to make out - was still sometimes hard to make good sense of, even as he’d sorted it out as multiple somethings and tried to construct something that would work for them. 

“Creature?” Zarkon sounded alarmed and quietly worried, looking up sharply.

He was already focusing on adjusting; blend in to the energy that was moving around it until it would pass through as if he weren’t there, if there were no snarls of running into things then it wouldn’t turn to actual fire. 

“Stay here.” He walked forward into it. 

He was focused on keeping one foot in front of the other, being a part of the flame that would not get caught up in it, letting it pass through without flinching. It was a wounded animal, it would echo fear, so he approached it with none; the Queen’s “no, stay here - he has this” only barely registered. 

He reached the end of the scaffold and the lift up to the head of the ‘ship’; the central body was only half constructed, the main outer chassis was lifted off the body, the internal parts entirely visible. He placed a hand against it, breathing out and letting his own energy out in a feeler, an offer and an open invitation.

It was a storm of flames, something massive and disoriented, a battered remnant that was bleeding. It was trapped, it could tell nothing of where it was or what was going on, something was wrong and it was struggling, it wound around him in a mass of claws and flames and flashing teeth, raw power that dug in and bit into his being. He held still, not flinching, waiting, holding out intent - he was not there to trap it, he was trying to follow what he could read, he was not there to enslave but to co-operate and save it from whatever had become of it.

It latched in deeper, grabbing at the image of the hangar, his perceptions of the area, of where it was and what was being built around it. 

Something was wrong, it was awake before it had proper senses here, it was weakening, it was bleeding out; it drew from him to try to heal itself, a transfusion to balance the loss. He stayed unflinching, but he couldn’t quite get enough purchase to try and mend anything; for a moment it felt like it would draw too much, pulling out more than he could give, draining and tearing at the understructure of his own energy.

Then there was another set of hands at his side, his wife curling around his shoulder and elbow to throw her own power into it and put more stable channels and controls on it than he could manage alone with something that huge dug into him. She reached through, helping extend and steady his reach so that he could find the spot that was bleeding and weave a temporary patch over it. A familiar guarding bulwark of a presence was standing over them, physically larger than him but tiny next to what he was speaking to; Zarkon was only stopped from pulling him away by a half-heard ‘I’ve got him, it’s under control’. 

The larger presence stabilized, more lucid, less raw instinct to lash out and fight, more aware of the tiny thing in its energetic claws. It relaxed its guard with that recognition, allowing Alfor to trace along its lines of power, reaching out to find where the problem was to come up with a better solution, an actual repair that would hold.

“Something in the internal power system in the chest shorted out; it’s damaged the integrity of the rest of the system and destabilized everything. I need hands in there to find it and repair it immediately; I have it calmed, so it’s safe to approach now.” 

He heard Honerva’s “I’m on it-” and Coran’s “Got it!” in unison from different sides of the work bay, two sets of running footsteps with a third from a little further behind that had to be Trigel. One set paused and Honerva snapped, “You heard the King!”, getting several other sets of footsteps joining her.

It twitched at the sudden handful of even smaller-seeming presences digging around in its innards; he opened his eyes, watching and giving it the opening, letting a little more of his attention go to his physical surroundings again. The presence settled into that, an odd sort of heat haze overlaid on his awareness. 

Zarkon leaned in over his shoulder, uncertain and unsettled; he looked up and Zarkon flinched, briefly showing teeth in a drawn-back expression of alarm and a little fear. “Alfor?”

“The sensor systems aren’t complete or hooked up yet, and having people digging around in your innards is disconcerting.” It was half his voice and his words, but only half him in control of it, the tone all off, the other being’s sense of concepts and meaning getting filtered through him. 

Zarkon looked over his shoulder to the queen on the other side, and whatever her reaction was, he settled on uneasy acceptance, casting occasional nervous glances down. 

As the repairs reinforced his bit of temporary patching, closing it over, the half-built lion nudged into him, tracing unhappily over the damage it had done drawing from him. Alfor was less concerned; it would heal cleanly, with time to recover his energy, but it decided not to leave that be.

It was stable, and had much more power than he did even half-there and recovering; it fed its power back into him, liquid fire tracing what it had torn to fill in gaps, mend tears, and replace missing bits and pieces, giving bits of itself to repair what it’d done.

The heat-haze on his senses passed; it was stable, calmed, but unfinished and still dazed, incomplete.

He murmured to it, soothing. “Sleep for now - we still have work to do.”

It settled to rest until its body was complete; he stumbled back, off-balance but already supported by hands on either side, slim on his right, large and clawed on his left. There was some kind of short unspoken exchange between his friend and his wife, and she stepped back; he could catch bits of her bemusement, that letting Zarkon take over was for the benefit of the Galra king’s rattled nerves even though it would never be said out loud. Zarkon stepped in to scoop him up easily, ignoring a quiet protest of being fine with a sharp, concerned glare down; he gave up, aware that everything in his own senses was still off-kilter enough that he was parsing a sort of comforting shadowy blanket as much as the physical being of his friend, a promise of safety. Maybe it was a perfectly good time to let go and rest, even if everyone else would call it ‘passing out’ later. 

 

 

He closed his eyes, and there was nothing but empty black again, for another indeterminate endless few moments.

 

 

There was smoke and haze, everything that could burn around the walkways and a few things that shouldn’t on fire. Red was trying to batter through the seal, to wake up and do something, but it was holding; he was lucky the binding seal was as solidly built as it was - he couldn’t afford much attention to shove back at it, to stay where it was, stay hidden. 

There was a clawed hand around his throat, big enough to engulf it, holding him up with his feet dangling well off the ground as if he weighed nothing. His sword hung half-useless in his hand; even if he tried, he wouldn’t reach anything but armor and he couldn’t put enough force behind the blow to even scratch that no matter how much work he’d put into the sword over the years. 

Zarkon had always been better than him in a straight up fight; he’d only rarely won sparring matches, and that mostly came from distractions or other circumstances.

It was even harder to focus with Zarkon rifling through his mind, digging for anything on where the lions were in a fixated desperation. There wasn’t any of the old caution to it, all of Zarkon’s wounded rage and gaping, slow-bleeding pain turned into a snarl of frustrated sharp edges and teeth, all the pains he’d taken to make sure he _didn’t_ know anything about where they were being taken as intentional injury and betrayal. 

He stayed passive on it, leaving everything open and bare; no fear, no flinching, just open surrender, letting the entire dark storm filter through and focus on searching with no sign of resistance. There were enough pieces torn out of him with the deaths of the others, his beloved queen, his world, most of his people, that he didn’t even need to fake being mostly broken, someone with nothing left to lose come to die.

He’d known before he arrived that one way or another, he wouldn’t be walking out of this.

He made no attempts at resistance until he was sure Zarkon had grown secure enough in the lack of it to have completely stopped minding him in favor of digging for what he might know, threaded through far too close and too much to pull away or get any kind of effective defense if he did move.

Zarkon had taken the bait and let him move the fight into an arena where he was the stronger one.

He lashed back, digging in through the relay bond like a barbed net; he had nothing to lose because _Zarkon had taken all of it_ , and he threw every bit of his own grief, all the suffering Zarkon had caused with everything he’d destroyed, every echo of someone else’s death and someone else’s pain Alfor had caught and carried, into digging in and through, making sure Zarkon couldn’t pull away or block him.

There was an entire jumble of memory leading up to this - every warning they’d given, every time he’d gone over what they were working on, every worried conversation held between the others when Zarkon was out of the room as things turned worse, everything from the rest of them Zarkon had missed while he was near-dead, the grief they’d all held when they’d thought they’d lost him, poring over equations and bits of research desperately for a way to do something.

 _We could have saved both of you - had it all laid out and ready - Trigel and I together had ideas, we could have done something if you hadn’t killed them - we all tried to warn you-_

An entire lifetime spent threaded through each other’s being, the ‘Golden Age’ Zarkon had been so worried about being finite, everyone who’d loved and cared about the Galra king, every good thing they’d had in their lives, gone _at your hands - you made the choices, you did all of this, you have no one to blame but yourself, we TRIED to save you_

He wedged it in with as much force as he could muster like a knife between Zarkon’s ribs. 

The snarling growl faltered with a metallic noise of pain, and Zarkon dropped him, suddenly off-balance and falling back; Alfor pulled his own stance back, sword at the ready, a few decaphoebs of built-up frustration and hurt all being thrown in to keep the assault over the relay digging in.

It was a violation, desecrating something never meant to be used against each other, but a violation Zarkon had dealt the first blow on. He wasn’t sure he’d survive feeling the last of that set of deep-rooted bonds severed into death, particularly not at his own hands, but he hadn’t expected to survive this fight anyway; he had an opening to strike and get it over with. 

He lunged, throwing his weight behind the sword he’d honed, woven power into, tweaked and added to for years as something to fidget with, driving it through Zarkon’s breastplate in what should’ve been a lethal strike.

The pain of it echoed back over the bond he was using to keep Zarkon disabled, mirrored in a burst of betrayed anger, shock, bits of bleeding guilt that were half-swept away in festering hurt and suspicion, but nothing dimmed. There was no sense of severing, no fading out.

Whatever was keeping Zarkon alive was powerful enough to shrug off a physical deathblow; if he shifted his efforts, pulled on the power he had to throw his own magic into it, channeled through the sword, he might be strong enough to choke it out, at least in skill and raw force.

Only in skill and raw force; he tried, until the feedback was overwhelming, a tangled mess of a shared life where his own effort to cut it off made it harder and harder to tell what was his and what was bits of Zarkon’s memory drug out in an echo.

The power he’d tried to throw into the attack faltered, sputtering out without more than a few superficial energetic gashes on whatever Zarkon had become, leaving Alfor sickened and shaken, his grip on his sword only holding because he might’ve lost his footing if he weren’t leaning on it. 

Even after everything Zarkon had done, knowing what Zarkon would do if left “alive”, he couldn’t do it.

He should’ve hated Zarkon, but all he could muster was a deep, despairing frustration at how _stupid_ , pointless, and utterly needless this all was. Even self-destructive rage and grief weren’t enough for him to follow through on killing his old friend.

Zarkon snarled, clawed gauntlet wrapping around his hand and the sword hilt; he pulled the blade out, throwing Alfor back in a stagger. 

He was going to die, Zarkon was going to continue on, and everything he’d failed to stop would fall on Allura’s shoulders someday - the universe was going to suffer for his inability to carve off the last tie he had, Coran and _Allura_ were going to continue to suffer for his failure, too much of a coward to be the last one standing who’d die completely alone.

He barely got some kind of wobbly footing before Zarkon was lunging, a wounded beast lashing back on blind reflex. The bayard barely took enough of a solid shape to have an edge; it cleaved through his armor and the bone and flesh under it as if there were nothing there, and he didn’t manage even an attempt to guard.

His sword clattered to the ground as he collapsed, no longer drawing air. He could feel the lion stirring, and barely managed to shove at the block more - it needed to be _away_ , hidden, not trying futilely to save him, and if he let her back in he’d be putting her at risk.

Zarkon’s boots and greaves were in front of him, and there was the quiet sound of the black bayard deactivating. 

The worst part of the strange tilting delirium was the isolation; he’d never really been _alone_ a day in his life, there had always been at least someone, usually multiple someones, that he could turn to, and all of them were gone - dead, carved away aching holes, sent away because their only chance was to be cut off from him as far away as possible.

He didn’t regret sending them away, even as the tatters of resolve that’d carried him into this fight faded out into selfishness, grasping bits of mental threads at the only one he could allow to still be there, the presence in front of him that was already faded dark - clinging to the relay pleading any bare mercy indication that there’d been some meaning to it all, to not leave him to die alone.

He heard an uncertain, unsettled growl, no other response but a strange uneasy consideration that wasn’t allowing itself to react. Somehow it was more comforting than if Zarkon had moved for a mercy stroke, that there was at least _hesitation_ at the end, Zarkon struggling to follow through on the last blow himself. 

_Allura forgive me._

It felt like an eternity waiting for his body to give out enough to leave him with nothing but a rapidly imploding starscape, then a flickering bloom of flame waiting to catch him where the black hole void had let go. 

The looming dark turned more frantic, desperation and survival panic mixed with worry, a brighter starfield digging in to hang onto him as they were falling. 

Shiro was calling, trying to pull him back, even though the Black Paladin was barely together himself. 

Keith felt like he’d been turned inside out and scraped raw and empty inside, a skinned hide hung out to dry, clinging onto the tethers to Red and to the others. Red felt stunned into a half-burned-out coal, the others were faint flickers, little bits of presence where there should’ve been loud bursts of life and emotion. 

It was his entire world, reduced to empty little guttering candles around him; Zarkon and the command center were out there, poised to snuff all of it out at any moment. The Galra Emperor was cut off from the relay, but either some other sensitivity or Keith’s own mind were filling in the presence outside of it, the black hole void with the claws and fangs of a hunting beast. 

Shiro was on the comms, talking through it, forcing himself to keep going even when Keith could tell that he was just as cleaned out as anyone else. He somehow managed to still sound confident, calling on them to reach out to their lions; Keith’s response was defiance layered over sheer, focused fear - he couldn’t die like this, and more than that, he couldn’t watch everyone else die, let what little he had be taken away like this.

He needed help, and giving everything he had to Red was the only thing that might save everyone else. 

He had enough awareness to know that he didn’t actually have anything to give when he tried to feed energy into Red - that it was a reckless, possibly fatal move to bleed into something else when he was half-dead already himself. 

For a moment, he wasn’t sure that it wouldn’t actually kill him, but he’d rather die throwing the last dregs of his being into trying to bring Red back than die waiting helplessly for Zarkon to kill everyone. 

The ember sparked, flared, and poured into him, Red snarling through him, the panic going up like tinder to relight sheer defiant rage, Red throwing her own protective rage through it - he wasn’t going to lose anyone, he would rip Zarkon to pieces bare-handed if that’s what it took to get the old husk away from his people. 

It was enough to carry through the rest of the fight and get him back to the Castle.

 

************************

Adrenaline, panic, and Red’s backwash of energy were only going to keep him standing so long, but he didn’t want to move, even when it was turning into half supporting himself on the back of the pilot’s seat.

He’d started to realize how hard it was to take away one of the bayards without them consciously giving it up when he’d accidentally called his without his armor back before the battle. He was starting to wish he’d never been given a reason to think about how closely their weapons were connected to the lions and to them, or where the bayards went when they weren’t in active use or intentionally set down somewhere.

The black bayard was resting in its socket in the cockpit. Shiro was gone.

Everything still felt off, surreal; like parts of his awareness were missing, colors were off, too vivid and not real enough simultaneously, and it seemed like it should’ve been a breakpoint for a nightmare. If he stayed still maybe he’d wake up. 

He closed his eyes, waiting for it to fade out, some nightmare from how hard they’d been hit fading out into something else. 

He’d black out, there’d be some other surreal nightmare or piece of someone else’s life, and Shiro would drag him back to awareness to finish the fight with Zarkon.

A larger hand settled over his, a solid presence tugging back as Hunk gave his wrist a squeeze. It was suddenly hard to _not_ be aware of everyone else crowded close around him, a mess of worry and hurt that he was in the middle of, Allura’s hand on his forearm on the other side.

He wasn’t alone, but it meant everything was real; he was standing in the Black Lion next to an empty chair, they’d won and not everyone had come back and there wasn’t even a reason or a clear sign of what had _happened_ , Shiro had been there for the last blow - all of them throwing whatever they and the lions had into doing what Alfor hadn’t been able to do ten thousand years ago.

They’d managed - something, it had better have been a full severing, he didn’t want to have to lost Shiro only to deal with Zarkon staggering back again - almost blacked out.

He almost wanted to shove everyone away from him, to get away from all of them dragging him out of his foray into denial, find some high-up little alcove somewhere in the castle to hide from everything. 

He tried to grab for the Black Lion - he knew he usually felt it walking into the cockpit, but the big presence was blank and flat; it’d somehow managed the divine version of unconsciousness, present and not dead but exhausted and nonresponsive. Even Red was a similar degree of flat, a bare candle-flicker that did the mental equivalent of feverishly swatting at a hand trying to disturb exhausted sleep. 

“We should get the Castle somewhere safe; we don’t know when any other Galra ships might arrive to investigate, and we won’t be able to do anything or have any way to find out what happened until we’ve made repairs and rested.” Allura squeezed his wrist.

He growled; it was a tiny, rattly, thin sound compared to what would’ve come from a full-blooded Galra, but it still got a couple startled flinches.

“Keith… come on - staying here won’t help us find anything.” Pidge tugged on his sleeve for his attention.

He hated it, but she was right. They were both right, Red was in no condition to check the wreckage, the only time he’d seen the Castle worse was after Sendak had shattered the crystal, he was barely standing and there was nothing they could do. 

“Are we going to just stay here waiting for it to come back online? I would advise strongly against that, every second that we linger dramatically increases the odds of the command center’s surviving personnel finding some functional ships in a hangar somewhere and launching a retaliatory strike, and thanks to your species’ appalling tendency to center major functions around abilities held by a tiny percentage of the population, I am unable to get it moved myself.” 

He only caught Slav’s voice over the comm muffled from someone else’s helmet nearby, but it still left him shrinking into hunched shoulders and growling again. 

Exhaustion and the aftereffects of taking an energy-draining planetkiller to the face started catching up as they hurried to the bridge, Allura in the lead; he was on a dazed autopilot, barely registering when she managed to get the teludav working long enough to jump the Castle away. It wasn’t actually any further than the Castle could’ve gotten on its own engines, but her apparent hope was that the wormhole jump would trick any Galra ships in the area into thinking they’d gone further away than they had.

They were somewhere, something about local interference and unlikely to show up on scans while they did repairs, something about an emergency shelter area and needing to shut down even life support and basic gravity in most of the ship for a while, they were getting herded to some other room in the lower decks.

Coran, Kolivan, and Slav were the most conscious and functional of the group that converged on the chamber below; it was one larger room with padded benches, storage crates, and its own internal water-recycling system independent of the rest of the Castle, a couple small chambers off of it. Not comfortable, but livable.

Coran made a few last checks of the room before he secured a simple light-armor spacesuit of his own to go start on the castle, taking Slav with him; Hunk half-flopped down on one of the benches, Lance sprawling draped over it next to him as Pidge staggered over to fall on it in a heap. 

He stood near it while Kolivan was making rounds of the room, taking stock of what supplies they had, and it sank in on him through the haze that there was something else deeply wrong.

“Where’s Antok?” 

Kolivan stopped, hands resting on the lid of the storage crate, not looking up or turning; whatever muffled sound he made, Keith was too exhausted and out of it and far enough across the room to not be able to make it out or guess what it was, but he could follow the implication just fine. 

He wasn’t even sure what’d happened there, either, besides the beating the Castle had taken, and he was too tired, hurt, exhausted, and heartsick to try to ask right now; it was enough knowing that someone else he’d started to trust and look to was gone.

Of course after ten thousand years Zarkon would refuse to go down without taking others with him. 

He took a couple staggering steps back before he half-turned to find a few of the large storage crates stacked by the wall with just enough of a gap between them for him to fit; he curled up at the back of the gap, against the wall. 

After everything he probably should’ve just dropped to sleep, but somehow that didn’t quite happen; he wasn’t sure how long he spent drifting in and out of fiftful naps and gnawing grief and shaken nerves, hazy bits of memory and impressions that weren’t his mixed in with it. He dozed, and drifted awake confused at a lack of colors that he didn’t actually have words for, a lack of other awareness he’d never had, mentally feeling over bonds out that were muted and disoriented that they were _there_ , not cut-off bleeding holes.

Muzzy bits of present reality came through with waking up; Alteans seeing a wider color range than humans, Alfor probably shared Allura’s weird ability to talk to things and all with some other sense to match, part of Red’s backwash of energy had included Alfor’s last moments and the memory of what it was like having the relay bonds cut off violently with nothing to take their place.

He didn’t really think enough to flinch away from fear of false hope; Lance, Hunk, and Pidge were there, vague senses of person-over-there, ocean and solid earth and greenery. 

There was still a sense of something starscape, but there was no impression of anything; he swallowed and focused, trying to compare it to Alfor’s memory - it wasn’t the cut-off “something yanked out” feeling that had tormented his predecessor, it was more like the weird kind of “signal drop” that happened when they weren’t close to each other or in the lions.

Maybe he’d only lost one person in that fight. Antok was gone, he was still absent any idea or energy to try to process that and he’d be expecting a second voice on anything with Kolivan for a long time, but with Shiro at least was right back to where he was at the start - but this time he had a way to _know_ that Shiro was still alive somewhere, that trying to find Shiro and find some way to do something wasn’t just desperate denial.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title is from Failure to Thrive by Faith and the Muse. 
> 
> If anyone expected this chapter to be happy, I ... am not sure what to tell you.


	33. Beyond the Crowns of Kings Once Mighty and so Adored

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith struggles more with scrambled dreams while recovering from the Komar and Shiro's disappearance. Kolivan is slowly slipping into trying to herd Keith whether Keith realizes it or not.
> 
> Then accidentally finding some old games and things stored in the shelter makes it harder to avoid the lingering ghosts of the old paladins and old history, and Keith isn't the only one who got flickers of his predecessor thanks to the Komar scrambling things.

Time passed hazily in the emergency shelter. Keith wasn’t keeping track of much at first; all of them were exhausted, and Allura seemed almost as wiped out as the people recovering from being hit by the planetkiller. 

He didn’t know how long he slept, sliding through fitful fragments of dreams that melted between deserts and bright white cities, ships that were familiar and stations that most definitely weren’t, the Castle’s empty halls and the Castle teeming with people of multiple species. Sometimes something almost caught enough to resolve into focus on a person or something going on, but even in dreams it seemed he was too exhausted and half-dead for much of anything. 

He was pretty sure he’d woken up a few times to deal with eating and other necessities, but that didn’t seem very distinct from the dreams, and a few times he wasn’t sure if he’d gotten up or just dreamed about moving to get food.

The hazy blur eventually came into focus, inasmuch as the word could even be used for blinding light, an overwhelming awareness of power that went beyond comparing to standing in the heart of a sun, and a deep, overwhelming sense of panic and something deeply wrong; it was a sharp, fast drag back to consciousness, fire yanking him awake as Red’s panic and sense of wrong echoed, tangling up with the other lions and three other sources of similar confusion and alarm.

Only three, where there should have been four, the starscape that sat at the center of the relay oddly veiled, over-focused, and nearly drowned out by the power flooding around like water at the depths of the ocean.

The Black Paladin managing to keep enough hold on their tie to the lion to be outside of Voltron without it breaking up barely even registered as a shock; he was _outside of Voltron_ at the worst possible time - it was almost certain they were going to lose him for good, this time. 

All of them were trying to get purchase through the noise, to call him back, to throw something for an anchor, to make sure he didn’t get lost, but it didn’t entirely seem to be holding; there was a sinking, dreadful feeling that leaving the living machine had been intentional, that their attempts at calling back were noticed and ignored, even while he could almost feel the other Paladin being flooded out in spite of the Black Lion’s best efforts.

He started awake out of the worried, sickened panic, flinching into the blankets away from blinding light that wasn’t there, then having another one of the odd moments of disorientation at his vision and senses being different. 

It didn’t completely go away, just faded enough for him to also be disoriented that he didn’t have claws digging into the blankets - the not-quite-fitting he’d grown almost used to again since Zarkon amplified it, only now added to being more sure his vision was off and feeling weirdly blinded over something that wasn’t sight or anything he could put words to - something _missing_ from his awareness that he’d never actually had. 

He wasn’t sure if the extra blankets in his small cranny between storage crates were things he’d grabbed while moving or something someone else had put into the corner, but there were empty stashed containers from the pressed emergency-ration bars and empty water pouches shoved into a small pile. 

He went through shuffling out of his hiding space in a disoriented daze, dealing with routines and necessities where he didn’t really pay any attention to it until he digging through the food stores, staring at a label on a package with tired confused distress that he couldn’t read it.

It took him a minute after that to figure out that it was labeled in Altean and a few other languages, he could pick out Galran on there, and to remind himself that he hadn’t actually learned to read either. 

He was pretty sure it was something edible, even if Red was still dead exhausted-asleep, responsive enough for a sense of existence but not enough for her usual concept-translation attempts or confirmation. It looked like the same writing as on the ones Coran had shoved at him earlier, and when he sat back enough to notice his surroundings more, Kolivan was watching him concerned but not moving to correct him on it, so he’d probably grabbed something edible. 

Nobody else was awake.

Well, Slav was awake, but he was barely visible in the middle of about six or seven different light screens, and Coran wasn’t in the room, but everyone else was still asleep, Allura on a bench, the other Paladins huddled in a haphazard blanketed pile on the floor. 

He shambled back to the pile in his small space with food and a pouch of water, barely even noticing what he was eating before he passed out again. 

Somehow his dreams were more disjointed, if easier to distinguish as dreams, sometimes caught in the fitful sort of not-quite-asleep where the bits splintered into a broken replay of waking up to go get food before fraying back out into the mess. 

Nothing wanted to stay together solidly, images flickering and spliced together like scrambled bits of film spliced together with only tenuous connections. 

The castle as he was used to it; quiet, empty, many of the halls half-lit, vaguely peaceful; a sense of tight panic and blood smeared the walls with corpses in different uniforms littering the halls; it was vaguely peaceful and well-lit with a constant background drone of voices and people of different species going about their business in the halls. 

Fumbling with the lock on the food container in frustration, realizing he was asleep, shambling out of the blankets to try to fumble with the latch again and get more frustrated that he was still asleep and it wasn’t moving because he wasn’t actually at the storage crate. 

The broad desert stretching out around a jumble of very human concrete, adobe, and glass mixed with tall spires of utterly incongruous mostly white architecture; a sunset that wasn’t making up its mind if it was over scrub hills or a green mountain valley.

Hazy awareness of some movement from the others, complaints that weren’t quite worth waking up for before he drifted back completely asleep. 

Everything tilted for the worse; the silver-trimmed diner with the old neon sign that had always been in the neighboring town, a frequent stopover for cadets, torn up with half of it burned open along the top, roof open to a crimson-clouded sky scattered with battlecruisers. The metal and neon sign over the doors was twisted, half of the yellow “Papa’s Diner” script torn off, only a fragment of the stylized flames painted around it remained, the rest engulfed in a very real fire; a scarred and violet-eyed Zarkon looked up boredly from the wreckage, attention suddenly caught, Keith very aware he had just been centered as a target. 

Piloting a small ship breaking a Galra cordon around some unfamiliar station, skidding to a landing that was more of a controlled crash in a hangar, hatch open and hitting the ground running while it finally lurched to a stop; drones everywhere, only barely being noted as obstacles to dodge around or go through with a blade where necessary, the only thing that mattered was _finding Allura before they did_ , red armor and violet eyes waiting outside some kind of dorm building that was thoroughly locked down by soldiers and drones. 

A narrow Galra walkway over an open space, flames engulfing walls that rationally shouldn’t have been able to burn that way via any normal means, staggering unevenly through exhaustion and injury, Shiro still in his armor with the prosthetic live, face impassive and eyes glowing gold. He tried to raise his sword but already knew it wouldn’t work, he knew what it would take, what it would mean, it wasn’t something he could do - 

It hazed out dark, and there was a confused few moments of tangled blankets and the fading smell of chemical smoke trying to grasp why there would be a hand on his shoulder nudging him. 

Nightmare. Someone was nudging him out of a nightmare and trying to say something to him.

There was really only one explanation that made sense through sleep-addling. “Shiro?”

Whoever it was froze, and Keith blinked blearily to look up at Lance, stuck in a momentary overload of worry, grief, and sudden uncertainty. Keith shrank a little, not pulling away or moving to pull back; it was an awful conflicted, confused and uncomfortably vulnerable moment, caught off-guard that the others were checking on him and Lance was worried enough to come try to wake him up from nightmares and the queasy drop that not only was it not Shiro, Shiro wasn’t even there at all. That wasn’t helped by the pang of guilt that he _did_ want Shiro there, even though Lance was the one checking on him, and there was a hovering shape behind Lance where Hunk was trying not to crowd. 

Lance looked away, as if he were somehow guilty himself, then dropped his coat over Keith’s head, retreating back out of the space Keith had wedged into with a hurried scramble. 

Keith curled into a ball under the jacket, dragging it in with the few blankets and making no effort to move it from where it’d draped over his face and head. It was starting to sink in more, that Shiro wasn’t there and they had no idea what had happened to him or if they could get him back, again, and the jacket at least gave some thin layer of cover to help tune out that he was hiding in between storage crates in a large room with everyone else crammed into it and the mice probably lurking somewhere. 

He had the others and the Castle, but it was hard to mark it up any better than before with Kerberos; it felt like he’d just gotten Shiro _back_ , with the lions and Voltron something that should’ve meant he wouldn’t just vanish, and yet here he was, in a half-dead Castle after dragging back the inactive Black Lion, without Shiro or any sign of where he was or what had happened to him. 

Hiding under Lance’s coat and the rest of the pile of blankets in between a couple of larger storage crates wasn’t much for privacy, but it was about as much as he was going to get until the Castle was repaired.

It somehow managed to be enough, with everything starting to catch up; he wadded up into the back corner as much as he could, stifling a faint whine as he curled up into a ball with Shiro’s disappearance and the entire massive battle crashing in. The twinges of wanting someplace more secure to have the muffled sobbing breakdown didn't stop it, and he wasn’t sure when he fell asleep in the middle of it.

He woke up blearily to a stuffed head, mouth like sandpaper, a dull pervasive ache in his chest, his legs half-pinned, and a confusing awareness of solid warmth and other weight that definitely wasn't blankets or the bulkhead.

Lance’s jacket was still draped over his head in a tangle, parts of the lining still damp and sticky. Half-awake and addled, he almost tried to pull the jacket off his face, but found one arm pretty well trapped under a weight that gave a not-coherent grumbling groan and insistently shifted to stay put.

Apparently he not only had Lance’s jacket draped over him, at some point while he was asleep he ended up with Lance draped over his entire blanket cocoon.

That probably made the larger warm weight he was leaning against Hunk, and the tangle around his legs Pidge. There shouldn’t have been enough space between the storage crates for all of them like that, which meant he had either slept through getting picked up and moved, or slept through one of the storage crates being moved; he couldn't tell which that moment. 

He tried to get his other arm loose, but that mostly found an awkward tangle of blankets made more of a mess by having more than one person involved in it ending up tangled. 

It at least got another sleepy mumble, this time from Hunk; after a pause there was a distinct “Oh”, followed by something less distinct about ‘awake’, and then part of the weight over his shoulder that had one of his arms pinned moved, and there was a noticeable nudge on the other weight that would be Lance. 

Lance shifted enough for him to pull part of the blanket loose while Hunk fumbled to detangle the jacket he’d apparently fallen asleep clinging to in spite of still having it over his head. Pidge hadn’t budged or given any sign of stirring.

Part of him wanted to cling closer, part of him wanted to flatten at being that vulnerable and scramble away to hide in some higher storage compartment or something. He hadn’t realized he’d frozen until Hunk’s hand was over his head, smoothing through his hair awkwardly. “S’ok.” 

Hunk didn’t sound much more coherent than he felt. 

“Or maybe not okay. But it’ll be okay. Or something.” 

He wanted to cling to his people, to just stay close until the specter of emptiness vanished. He wanted to pull back and hide; he wasn't sure how to exist alone, he wasn't sure how to function with people and not end up screwing up, being alone was unnatural, he was going to end up alone and it would just hurt more to get used to not being alone. 

He wanted to cling to Shiro, and Shiro was gone.

He was hungry and thirsty somewhat, but also still exhausted, like no amount of sleep and food would actually mean being fully awake and aware. 

He went limp, not sure what to do with any of it and well aware that he was still dealing with specters of confusion that things weren't colors there weren't any human words for, that the dim lighting was weirdly darker than it should've been somehow, that something important was missing from his awareness that he couldn’t put words to at all. Hunk kept carefully petting his hair with occasional little soothing noises, and Lance seemed to have settled for just draping close by, unsure of what would even help. 

After a couple minutes, he squirmed again, mumbling something about food without bothering with silly things like full sentences. The others fumbled awkwardly to let him up, and he shambled across the bay to the storage bins.

He was hungry enough that the weird pressed-soy rations actually sounded appetizing, even with the little nagging not-his feeling that they'd be kind of gross and bad to try to eat too much of.

Alteans were close enough to human diet for their food to've been "close enough" for the other Paladins, but he was starting to wonder if it was something fudgy and not really an exact fit, if that other reaction was Alfor's memory. 

He drug the rations and water back to the corner where everyone was, pushing through the panicky lump in his throat that wanted to stay away; he didn't want to think too hard about how much of the impulse to stay close to them and cling without budging was the fallout of Alfor's death and not even his emotions. 

"You know we should all get food," Hunk mumbled distractedly.

Lance had propped up leaning on him bonelessly, which at least gave Keith an excuse to not return to exactly where he was. All the response Lance mustered was a very vague, dazed "Yeah", without any movement to actually do something.

Pidge had burrowed and curled in a wad with the blankets, forming a round lump that just gave an even less identifiable grumble-growl.

Keith chewed on the ration bar; it was about as flavorless as the mush, and took some gnawing to get pieces off. His tired occasional struggle with it ended up enough to get the others moving - or at least, to get Hunk nudging Lance and the two of them levering up to shamble over to get food of their own, before returning to the corner. Lance nudged one of the Altean ration-bars under the edge of the blankets, where it vanished, yanked into the lump. 

Keith wasn't going to fight her to get the blankets back.

Lance was stripping the wrapping off the bar, giving it a weary, dubious stare. "I hope they get the pool working again soon. I miss swimming." 

Hunk raised an eyebrow at him. "That's the first thing you're after?" 

"Yeah? 's felt gross enough not being able to get a really good shower."

"Maybe your predecessor was a fish," Keith mumbled around the ration bar.

Lance gave a nervous, uncomfortable laugh that trailed off, and he stared at his own, green bar longer, a strained expression of disgust crossing his face before he heaved a resigned sigh and shoved it partway in his mouth. 

It was a slightly less awful period of being awake, going through the motions of basic routines, sharing grumbles about there being only one bathroom and half-functional shower in that part of the emergency shelter that they all had to compete for; Allura drily noted that the Castle had other shelter space, enough to potentially - if uncomfortably and with a lot of crowding - hold the entire functional crew, which had other bathrooms, but there wasn't any reason to waste power keeping them active when there were this few people on the ship. 

There wasn't much to do in the shelter but wait; Keith settled somewhere near where Kolivan was sitting to pull out his old tablet and read. When Pidge finally came out of the blankets, she started going through the storage compartments, Lance peering over her shoulder and the mice running over to join them. Hunk started to ask if that was a good idea, then looked back to Allura, who simply looked sadly distant and then shrugged. 

Keith got distracted from his own reading by noticing blocks of English text on Kolivan's screen, with some bits of a program in green that looked like something Pidge had made. He didn't realize he'd looked up obviously and was staring until Kolivan shifted just enough to look over, one eyebrow raised, then turned the screen so that it'd be easier for Keith to see if he edged just slightly closer. 

"There's an open archive in the Castle's computer for books and media. It had a directory that was more recent, with an extra program tacked on for translation." 

The blocks of text were familiar now that he could get a better look at the untranslated English; the dense wall of the Silmarillion that had decent odds of being a copy of the file on his tablet, part of a legacy of things he'd picked up around middle school that'd turned into reading that'd often helped with distracting from other things to wind down to sleep. "Pidge must've backed it all up to the Castle at some point off our personal devices." 

If there were movies and other media, then it probably also included whatever games people had on their devices, books, Lance's collection of movies and TV series, and other stray files of the same sort. 

And Kolivan had gotten curious and bored and found something that wouldn't be prying into anyone's personal files or getting into secured data of the Castle's. 

_So great was her sorrow, as the Music unfolded, that her song turned to lamentation long before its end, and the sound of mourning was woven into the themes of the world before it began. But she does not weep for herself; and those who hearken to her learn pity, and endurance in hope._

"Is it some sort of religious text?"

He almost laughed, shaking his head. "Not really? It was - there was an author, after we'd figured out industry, who was upset and irritated that the folklore and old values and ideas of the areas he lived in were being written off as children's stories and thrown out, so he took bits of it and some other mythologies of the area, and tried to make something that would bring back some of it in a set of books. The ones he finished before he died were fantasy stories; this one was pulled together from his notes and half-written fragments." He looked up, watching the others all leaning into a cabinet; Pidge might've read it at some point, Lance probably was familiar with Lord of the Rings and Hunk was a craps shoot, but he wasn't sure he could picture any of them being strongly attached to the Silmarillion. "It's probably mine, I had a lot of his work in with my other books." 

Kolivan was quietly watching him, he was pretty sure, although it was the thing the Galra leader had done before; not really turning to look and using the lack of visible pupils to make it hard to confirm where he was looking. 

It was awkward, and before Keith even really thought about it he found himself picking up and going on, unsure what else to do with the silence. "He'd...been through one of the first wars fought with firearms, when chemical weapons were still a new idea; it was a dumb war, a bunch of different countries getting tangled up in jumping in to defend their allies and turning on each other with half of them not even sure what they were fighting over. Almost his entire generation in that part of the world died in that war. It was - a lot of it was about how destructive power and seeking it for its own sake was, how much war took from people, and how important it was to cling to hope and compassion instead of going off seeking glory." It was a late, distracted stray thought that he didn't normally ramble like that, not sober and not to people he didn't know very well, but he wasn't sure how to word asking Coran if it was something Alfor did or if it was worth trying. 

Kolivan did shift where Keith thought he was looking at the screen more; he noticed that the other window that was trying to put it into Galra script had words and pieces here and there outlined, some with a handful of glyphs, some in red that had the English word under another set of glyphs - things that didn't translate right or where there wasn't really a word for it, like names of animals.

It was probably a good thing Kolivan had found something more abstract and not the Jungle Book, where having no concept of most of the animals would be more of a hindrance.

Whatever Kolivan was thinking over, it got interrupted by a clatter from the other three, as one of the cabinets set into the wall turned out to've been more precariously stowed than they'd realized; there were a couple of confused yells and more commotion as they all were left trying to not trip over the mess of random odd small objects that'd fallen out, along with boxes and haphazard odd pieces of wood and metal and a spread of small colored stones.

They'd all frozen as soon as they could, and Keith was eying some kind of odd device of bits of angular, colored metal warily; there was no telling what they'd just opened or what any of it was. 

Allura shot up from where she'd been dozing on the bench, diving for her staff, then stared at the mess as the three culprits looked vaguely guilty but stayed unmoving. She stared at them, and the spread of clutter across the floor.

Then she covered her mouth and curled up laughing. 

"...This stuff isn't going to blow up or anything is it?", Hunk asked weakly, and Kolivan stifled a bark of laughter, shoulders shifting with it; Allura's bout of laughter redoubled, and it was going to take her a minute to breathe enough to talk. Kolivan dismissed his computer screen, scooping up some kind of carved grey bowl and collecting a number of the colored stones that'd scattered in it. 

Pidge picked up one of the smaller devices and poked at it experimentally, squinting.

"Are these...puzzles?"

"And old games, yes," Allura finally managed to get out, trying to straighten. "To my knowledge this room was never used for its proper purpose in my father's time, but they would occasionally come here to dodge attention." 

Someplace quiet and out of traffic where nobody would come looking, to while away free time in relative peace; there'd be plenty of excuse to keep games and things to stave off boredom in case of a real emergency stashed down here. 

With the threat of anything blowing up or upsetting Allura past, the other three started gathering up everything that had fallen out of the cabinet, Pidge piling some of the odd little puzzles in her arms, Lance and Hunk gathering up decks of cards, some odd-shaped, and trying to sort out which cards went to which set. Pidge stopped staring down at a couple of vaguely recognizable chess pieces with narrowed eyes and a tiny frustrated noise, grumbling invectives at the Sphinx and its trials and something less intelligible about Alfor. 

Kolivan had retrieved a few other pieces that set into the bowl and gathered up a number of stones; he leaned on one of the storage containers on the sidelines, studying it oddly pensively. Now that it was put back together, there were four panels that rested on top of the bowl, each one with a number of evenly spaced small hollows just big enough for one of the stones to rest in, and a sort of spire in the middle of each quarter-panel that had a hollow on the top for one stone. 

Allura caught sight of it and stared for a moment, then turned, attention suddenly focused on the mice next to her.

If Kolivan recognized it then it was probably something Galra, and there would've only been one Galra that would've been responsible for contributing to the haphazardly stored distractions in a room the old Paladins had used as a hideaway. At some point, Zarkon had been in this room, playing games and drinking with Alfor and the others, the card decks and board games shoved haphazardly out of the way and likely not touched since. Keith felt like, if he focused on it, he might even be able to get the edges of old laughter, teasing and bad jokes; something that had been happy memories, tarnished over the glow.

Kolivan stayed lost in whatever thought had him until after the trio had packed the rest of the mess back up and settled back by the wall, a few of the small puzzles kept out; Pidge was turning one over tiredly trying to figure it out, while Hunk and Lance shuffled through some of the alien card decks, idly thinking out loud on if there was an Altean equivalent of poker.

Lance looked up over at Allura, and was visibly plotting for a minute, before standing up with the deck; watching from the side, it was an almost visible transition from "mostly just tired" to Lance pulling back some bits of good cheer as he held the cards up with a "Hey, Princess?". Keith braced for the awkward mess that was one of Lance's flirting attempts and bad pickup lines, and the way Allura's eyes narrowed, she was half expecting it herself. 

It never came.

"So, any chance you'd know any games with these? Like, Altean poker or something?" 

Allura blinked, off-guard. "Well, of course - I think. What is Poker?" 

That veered off into Lance going through the best explanation he could, Allura quickly catching that it was usually gambling; Keith looked down at his book, torn again with being outside on the edge and almost wanting to go over and get involved, but not having the first idea how and being more afraid of it than he wanted to admit, even if he couldn't quite avoid it. 

He edged over by where Kolivan was; the Blade was closer, and easier to approach without having to figure out interaction that was well outside of Keith's normal comfort zones even if he did have the jarring not-his feeling it should've come easily. He was pretty sure Kolivan had noticed, although Kolivan didn't comment at first, just watching Lance tug Allura back to the others so she could do impromptu lessons in alien card games. When he did turn his attention to Keith, there was something a little pointed, even if he wasn't saying anything yet.

Keith thought about going over. He wasn't sure what to do with the chatter, and after the first knot of uncertainty, his next reflex was -

Both to follow behind Shiro who'd make it easier, and to expect Shiro to nudge him about it, neither of which were going to happen.

It left him not only feeling less like getting involved, but queasy about the idea of getting drug into something like a poker game when he had no idea where Shiro was or what had happened. 

He pulled back, folding his arms and shrinking away, half expecting Kolivan to finally cut in with some kind of reprimand about being antisocial - after all, Kolivan had been the one who'd emphasized how important it was for him to try to work more with the others. Instead, he was jarred out of bracing for it by Kolivan turning to walk back to the far wall where he'd been sitting before, sitting down with the odd board in front of him; he was just studying it, turning one of the stones over in his claws thoughtfully.

There wasn't anywhere else to go, and staying out in the open for too long would probably mean someone trying to grab him; he crept back over to sit near Kolivan, pulling his knees up to his chest and hoping using Kolivan as a sort-of shield against getting drug into social interaction would work. It wasn't that he really enjoyed being isolated, but the idea of trying to chase distractions like nothing had happened left everything feeling tense and wrong; no matter how much he knew he should've been able to handle it, he just couldn't make himself go over there with the others.

He caught a flicker of something that drew his attention back over, and realized Allura had definitely noticed, paused in whatever she'd been saying with a clear expression of concern that Pidge was starting to follow. He looked away, trying to look 'fine' and very aware he had no idea what that meant here - he needed a distraction. 

Which meant scooting a little loser to Kolivan, where he could better try to get a look at the old carved board. 

"So...what is it?"

There was something oddly dubious about the way Kolivan looked up, but whatever it was, no comment was made. "It's a _Wakut_ set - a very old strategy game of sorts, dating back to well before we had space travel." He looked back to it, setting the stone he'd been holding in the hollow on one of the four raised pieces. "Each player gets two quadrants of the board to spread their pieces across, with two on their spires; all of the other pieces can be moved a space at a time, or over an enemy piece to remove it. The spires can only be claimed by getting two pieces on either side, one of which replaces the opponent's piece; the goal is to claim all four spires." 

He nodded; it was a little like some kind of weird cousin to checkers. 

There was something else nagging at the back of his mind, a ghost of a memory that he wasn't sure he wanted, not after seeing how Alfor had died. 

Kolivan pulled one of the other stones out of the bowl, turning it over a few times before putting it on one of the other spires - two blue-indigo stones; the other set mixed into the bowl was red. Keith shifted a little, hands over each other on his knees so he could rest his chin, watching quietly. Kolivan continued setting pieces on the board, almost meditatively, blue and red on different quarters of it; there weren't enough stones to fill the board, leaving gaps here and there that didn't seem to be set. 

"Usually the players take turns choosing spires, then each lay their pieces around them."

Something itched to rearrange some of the stones; the board was divided in halves, alternating quarters would've looked more familiar, the gaps on both sides weren't laid out in any configuration that would've been there. He sat on the impulse to try to "fix" it. Kolivan was occasionally nudging a stone with a clawtip or moving one to change where the open spaces were. 

' _If you put half the thought into actual tactics in the field you do here-_ '

He shook his head a little, squeezing his eyes shut to banish the memory of a much younger sounding Zarkon's amiable frustration.

He wasn't sure if it was an easier subject to distract himself with or not, but it felt a little like it might be at the time. "So how much did you know?" He slipped a hand loose just enough to motion with a couple fingers at the board; something that'd been Zarkon's, once, before he'd turned on the others.

Kolivan gave a thoughtful, faint rumbling noise. "Not a great deal. He has gone out of his way to suppress and destroy records of history before the Empire, particularly whatever occurred leading up to its creation and the alliances that existed before, replaced with a very ... skewed narrative. We have specialists that are dedicated just to finding remnants of actual records, then reconstructing and analyzing them; the field work is... nearly as dangerous as infiltration, because of how zealously he still pursues keeping the truth buried." He moved a couple more of the stones along the edge of one of the quadrants. "We knew he was once the Black Paladin - and that actual information on the Paladins was one of the things he worked the hardest to erase." 

"So the Castle and all of this?" 

"Not a complete surprise. We've managed to get bits of intelligence from directions that survived since then; between that and reading between the lines, we knew Altea and its late King had been closely involved, and that there had been a prior alliance, contrary to Imperial propoganda." He poked one of the spire-stones. "The surviving stories of Voltron consistently spoke of the Paladins being close."

Stories and passed down legends, fragments and reading between the lines; going from just enough clues to figure out that the people that had existed before had once been familiar, to having a mess of board games where they'd hidden out to get away from things, and one of Zarkon's old game sets. 

"Allura and Coran still avoid talking about it..." He knew more than that, but even with the apology, he wasn't sure how solid he really was with Allura anymore, and he definitely recognized when something that had come up was in too much confidence to say anything about. It was half a dodge, really, since Kolivan had to know that if Alfor had been close with Zarkon once, that meant Coran and Allura had also been familiar with him back then. 

Kolivan nodded, and there was one of those unreadable moments where Keith wasn't sure what was going on; Kolivan was definitely observant enough to've noticed the way Allura's moment of humor had died sharply when she'd seen the Wakut set. 

The old Blade didn't say anything at first, just closed his eyes for a long moment. 

"This is something that weakens him." Kolivan opened his eyes, tapping one of the spire stones. "Someone who can convince others they aren't fallible, that they're somehow different from everyone else around them in a way that eliminates mistakes or weaknesses, can use that for power. This is..." He went thoughtful, pausing. "A confirmation, that even with whatever he's done to live this long, Zarkon was a man like any other underneath it, the same as any other dictator." 

Keith nodded quietly; he was used to hearing the same basic commentary on history for different reasons - that the signs of humanity from dictators and those who committed atrocities proved it wasn't any kind of strange alien quality to them, it was just the worst potential coming out. 

The conversation meandered a little; things trailed off into silence for a while, then Kolivan started following up on some of what they'd said on Olkarion, questions about Earth, the culture they were from, Earth's history. It was scattered, and somewhere in it Keith dozed off again, still recovering from the Komar.

*************************

He wasn't sure how long they'd been dealing with repairs. Coran and Slav had started borrowing Pidge and Hunk as they were more conscious and active to help with repairs, leaving him in the shelter with Kolivan, Allura, and Lance.

At one point, Allura wandered over, shifting her weight, looking away, and fidgeting; he was starting to want to edge back along the wall or find some excuse to get away just for not knowing what to do with the awkwardness, and not being sure which way it was going or what was going on. 

"Keith, I-", she started, then stopped, looking away again, and for a moment, she stared off in the direction of the hangars. "...I'm sorry." 

She retreated, hurrying back to her own corner to some kind of hushed conversation with the mice, who sounded a little agitated. 

He was mostly, otherwise, managing to keep to himself, although there was a point where Slav had borrowed Kolivan for extra hands and he was left stuck half-tired and half just feeling more skittish than he had in a long time about people, missing Shiro and not wanting to be out in the open; he knew there were storage spaces up higher in the walls, and had managed to get up to one to get a place to read in peace, dragging one of the blankets up with him. 

He'd fallen asleep there, dozing off with his tablet falling to the ground next to him in the small compartment. When he woke up, Kolivan was back in the shelter, keeping a quiet watch below; he left the blanket behind when he climbed back down, and Kolivan was watching with noticeable actual concern.

“Are you alright?”

“I guess?” He shifted weight from foot to foot a couple times, rubbing the back of his head; he wasn’t sure why that, of all things, had Kolivan worried, but he still somehow felt like he’d been caught out at something. “Just got tired of sleeping on the floor.” Which was sort of true, not that there was much difference between the floor and the storage compartment. 

The guarded look Kolivan gave him made him think Kolivan didn’t buy the dodge, but he didn’t press it. 

He realized not long after that Lance was watching him with an awkward, wary look of confusion; he wasn’t sure what to do with it, so he went over to the container with the food supplies, going on as if nothing happened.

Lance wandered over, sidling up as if trying and failing to act like he had just happened to be in the same place at the same time. 

“So. Uh.” 

When a couple beats passed without Lance saying anything else, just looking away and shuffling, Keith looked over, one eyebrow raised.

“There’s something Allura said I should talk to you about.”

Lance was still awkwardly hesitating, and it was starting to get to Keith. “Well?”

“It. Uh. Did you... see anything weird back there? When we got hit with that thing?” Lance was still fidgety and mostly looking anywhere except at Keith, only sneaking stray glances to check Keith’s reaction. 

Keith gave a faint grimace, trying to not think too hard about getting to relive Alfor’s death. “Yeah.”

Lance was looking up sideways, and somehow that seemed to settle some of the uncertainty. “So - Well, I guess you have an idea already? Allura said you knew something, and - it - there were humans around, and it felt like - it was on their planet - on Earth.”

Keith let out a breath, and pulled out his tablet, opening it and starting through the folders of the photos he’d taken while he was chasing the Blue Lion. “Yeah. There’s - an old Neolithic tomb hidden in Montana.” He found part of the sequence and held it over to Lance, a painting of a figure surrounded by people. “It was - I found it a little before Blue? There’s other paintings and carvings found in the area. They kind of stuck out that they probably weren’t old religious stories, because - it was some figure coming from the sky that was just... hanging out. Not anything spectacular or world-shaping.”

Lance stared at it for a minute, then took the tablet, holding it like it was made of taped together glass; he glanced up again, looking for permission, and Keith motioned for him to go ahead. 

For a few minutes Lance was mutely flipping back and forth through the pictures, occasionally settling somewhere to stare distantly at it. Then, he handed it back, one of the images of the actual tomb filling the screen. 

"He was trying to convince Zarkon there was nothing there..." Lance folded his arms, shifting most of his weight to one foot. "It wasn't - Zarkon was trying to get in his head, so.... he pulled something intentionally sloppy, because as long as he was alive, Zarkon would've kept at it, and - he wanted to protect Blue and ... us. Humans. Because we couldn't have protected ourselves, and he didn't want Zarkon having a reason to hang around." It was rare to see Lance that subdued, and the pensive tangle was audible, a jangly sort of feeling that slipped out onto the relay like a mess of broken shards of ice. 

Keith looked down at the tablet, the picture of the sarcophagus, a shot taken from the back of the cave to fit the whole thing in frame well; half-crumbled around the edges with the stone on top carved to hold a pair of swords fitted into it, slivers of blue and white that he'd never been comfortable disturbing. "Yeah. It... they knew he was protecting them - that he'd walked back into a trap because they were being used to bait him out." 

Buried with honors, by people that never should've been involved. "We have no idea how much they really knew... some of the murals around there showed something that looks like he'd told them some kind of stories about Voltron, but it's way more stylized than the carvings around Blue - drawn like the lions and all weren't machines. The stories didn't get passed on long enough for there to be other records." The best guesses were that the small group that'd been responsible for it probably scattered, subsumed into other tribes or changing over time; either way, they were left with no more account of the 'Sky Warrior' than a handful of murals and carvings wedged in odd places. 

It made more sense now, but there were other questions that would probably never be answered; if he'd told them about Voltron, did they know who Zarkon was? 

Were there any of them who realized that the invading group that had terrorized them and killed the Paladin was led by the same one that'd led Voltron? 

"You know it - ... it doesn't make a lot of sense. Why did he turn on everyone?" Lance shrank into his shoulders unhappily. " _How_ did he do it after - he was with them and they were all in each other's heads, way more than we are...how do you just - turn around and kill people when you've had something like that?"

Keith frowned, staring at the tomb photo; he had clues - Red prodding him about what he had in common with Zarkon, the memory of fracture lines he'd managed to piss Zarkon off by trying to re-open; he opened his mouth to say something, about Zarkon and how he'd reached a point where even the psychic links weren't enough to outweigh mistrust and hurt feeding into paranoia - 

Nothing came out, and he wasn't sure he could force anything out on it; Lance sounded rattled, _was_ rattled, and he was right, it was terrifying.

More terrifying than Lance realized, even; Keith knew there was something in common, a fear of staying too close, a nagging irrational belief that nothing would last and eventually it'd end with him getting hurt, he knew it was part of what had turned Zarkon into what they were fighting, but he had no idea how to make it _stop_.

He closed his mouth and shook his head; Lance's head ducked a little, brows furrowing with wary concern, then Lance gave an uncomfortable grimace and shifted weight back and forth a few times. "Yeah. I guess - maybe we're better off if we never do figure that one out, right?"

Keith tried not to react, just finding a suddenly fascinating spot on the wall.

"...Thanks anyway. I mean - I guess there's no way that would've been happy, but - I dunno, it's better to know, I guess?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from Revelations, by Zack Hemsey. 
> 
> As this goes on there's going to be a bit more with Kolivan and some of the bits of Galra history and behavior, although I will do a small giveaway that Keith wadding up in a small, high place was kind of the Galra equivalent of finding someone hiding in a pillow fort with a giant teddy bear.
> 
> There will also be a bit of a delay on next update (that isn't me getting eaten for holidays) because I have some "Blackout/Komar and aftermath" side pieces for almost all of the other Paladins, and I want to at least get Pidge's posted before the next chapter; it's not exactly necessary for it, but it *does* add a bit to something in the next chapter.


	34. Wounds Are All I'm Made Of - Did I Hear You Say That This Is Victory?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Allura braves Keith's mood swings, hoping to find out what actually happened to Alfor in the end. 
> 
> Now that he's more mobile, Keith struggles to deal with Shiro's absence, shaking Red for answers the lion can't give and ending up worrying and alarming everyone - and leaving Kolivan trying to decipher his lifetime's worth of tangled trauma.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do recommend reading the Pidge side for the Komar thing before this (If I Could Just See It All) on the "series" list - or after, but somewhere close to this; I didn't want to post this before that for Reasons.

Keith was afraid to check how long it'd been by the time the Castle had lights and gravity back online in the entire ship. It'd felt like a week or two, at least, and might've been longer, the way it'd all blurred together. Red was only just starting to stir, hazily half-awake with a malaise of misery in the back of his head, recovered enough to occasionally pay attention but not much more than that. She was still slumped over in a haphazard sprawl in the hangar the way she'd fallen after the fight with Zarkon, not up to moving yet to right herself even with help. 

He'd gone to curl up in the lion. She wasn't up to generating her own gravity yet; combined with her sprawl, it meant "down" in the cockpit was currently one of the walls, but it didn't take much work to rearrange the magnetic clamps so that the hammock was arranged where it'd work anyway. 

There was a discomfited unease. He could still feel the line to Shiro, even if it was still more like the mental equivalent of a dial tone and a "this number cannot receive messages at this time" than a presence. It was something, and he needed something to cling to; that they hadn't gotten this far just to lose Shiro. The lion was apprehensive, and had started trying to mute some of the sense of Wrong and things being out of order after a few hours where Keith had been slowly wadding further into a ball in the cockpit, his own anxieties compounded into nausea without realizing it wasn't even all his. 

With Shiro gone, the Black Lion hadn't shown any signs of stirring; Red had given him a sense of there having been some kind of communication between them since they'd started regaining consciousness, but all of it was in the area of scratchy, messy concepts that didn't translate well to the vague sort of mental communication they had. 

He caught a generality anyway. Things were incomplete. 

Any attempt at querying about where Shiro was got the kind of untranslateable tangle that made his head hurt, and after a couple attempts the lion had just started doing the equivalent of putting a mental paw on his head until he stopped trying. 

They couldn't do anything until the Castle and lions were more recovered, so he settled into the hammock, not feeling much inclination to do anything else.

He had dozed off, not keeping track of time; his dreams were still mostly garbled, uneasy nightmares, but they were at least starting to get easier to detangle what was his from what was Alfor's. It hadn't lessened the way the lingering echo of Alfor's death had stuck, but he probably should've guessed that it was hard to banish the vivid memory of someone else's traumatic death once it'd been invoked. 

Red was oddly apologetic after he'd woken up from bits and pieces of it replaying in nightmares. 

He'd been trying to get back to sleep, tuning out the Lion's occasional worried nudges, when there were footsteps outside the cockpit and a periodic distinct tapping, someone pointedly rapping against the walls as they came in just enough to make their presence known. He wasn't sure what he expected when he sat up; Kolivan was the only person he could think of that'd be looking for him, maybe Coran, but Kolivan was habitually near silent and neither of them were prone to more warning than a knock on the door. 

He shifted to curl back up and pretend to be asleep, but Red opened the door with the opposite of prompting from him. 

Allura was not who he expected; She was fidgeting, hands folded up against her chest, looking anywhere but at him. "...Keith?" She inhaled, trying to still the fidgeting. "...There's - something I needed to ask you about." 

He sat up in the hammock, hands stuffed down in his lap, and made a quiet acknowledging noise; he didn't really want to talk to anybody right now, but she seemed upset enough that it wasn't worth snapping at or trying to get her to go away over. 

"There was - something Lance asked me about. I think he already did ask you about -", she faltered, "...His predecessor, because I did tell him I had...already known that he'd died on Earth, because of what you'd found." 

Her father's friends, her family.

"He said something about how..." She trailed off, closing her eyes and stiffening, steeling herself. "That as far as he knew, all of you had seen ... how your predecessors had died." 

Her father. He nodded, looking down.

"I... we haven't... actually - we knew he was gone, Coran found - some reference that he had intended to confront Zarkon, alone, but... we - never found out what actually happened." 

It was left trailing off, the question unsaid and implied. 

It was hard to think about still, even if it was slightly blunted after replaying in his head a few times; there was still the sense of a dull ache where the Black Bayard had connected, a need to remember that the could actually breathe. "Are you sure?" 

She hesitated, then swallowed hard and nodded, not looking up.

He let out a breath. "I didn't see how he got there. He did...try to confront Zarkon, but..." She deserved to know, but he wasn't sure how much he could bring himself to explain or how much detail was really needed of how much of a walking-dead wreck Alfor was at the end. "It was ... something he knew he wasn't going to win; there wasn't much left anyway, and ... he knew Zarkon would keep hunting him, no matter what, to find the lions." 

She barely moved, just a faint nod that she was listening. 

"He... knew you were going to have to deal with all of it, and - he didn't want to risk Zarkon finding you." The miserable pit of guilt, that she was going to be stuck trying to fix his mistakes, the things he'd failed to stop and failed to prevent. "He was in pretty bad shape. He got in one good hit, but ... whatever was keeping Zarkon alive, he... wasn't strong enough to cut it off through the backlash, because they'd been tied together so close for so long. He couldn't do it." The feedback was almost the worst part; everything echoing back, until Alfor may as well have been trying to carve out his own chest. "Zarkon lashed back, and...that was it." 

The weight of it all was slowly trickling past her composure, and he was stuck between the lingering bits of Alfor's memory and recognition of the way her expression was cracking, familiar and somewhere _he'd_ been. 

Had his father had that kind of awful pit of regret when he'd realized he wasn't going to make it back? 

She was fighting to not fall apart, and started to turn. "I... thank you." It was quiet, weak, and faltering. "I should go." 

The lump in his throat shifted, and Red all but swatted him mentally to move before he'd even realized he was haphazardly lurching out of the hammock, a foot on the "wall" and one tangled in it. He managed to catch Allura's wrist before she could leave, somehow catching himself with his free foot well enough to not be falling on her. 

She stopped, trying to step up into the side of the doorway, staring back at him. "I don't - need pity, I just - you don't understand -" 

The last protest false-started, falling apart almost as soon as she said it; he might not have ever said much about his past, but he knew enough had come up here and there that she had to know he did have more of an idea than he ever wanted what losing a parent meant - he'd just been much, much younger than she was. He wasn't sure if that made it better or worse. He wasn't sure he even knew how he felt about any of it anymore besides that it was an awful mess that didn't make sense half the time.

He couldn't say it got better, he knew he was still a mess. He couldn't say it got easier, either; she had the advantage of at least being old enough to've had time to learn how to function before she was by herself, and to have Coran still there, and it didn't seem like it was much better for her anyway. He couldn't say he knew how to get through it or had some idea of something that'd help, because he was still trying to figure out how to handle things himself, still had that nagging fear that it was just How Things Worked that everyone around him would vanish, leave, die, or decide he wasn't worth the trouble sooner or later, still had that nagging fear getting periodically validated every time he started feeling like maybe it was as false as people trying to help had sometimes told him when he was growing up. 

Even Shiro had disappeared, again, the one person that had seemed like the exception. 

The best he had was awkward, worried helplessness. 

She started to shift weight away, winced, and then gave up on it, letting the awkward angles of the room do most of the work of dropping to cling around Keith's shoulders, face buried in his shoulder in an attempt to muffle sobs. His precarious balance didn't last long, staggering back into the hammock with his foot still tangled in it. It was awkward and uncomfortable and Allura was leaning on him completely.

He wanted to do something - but there wasn't really anything; she'd gotten her confirmation that her father had died at the hands of one of his closest friends, someone she'd grown up around who'd helped teach her and look out for her, and nothing he did would change it. He wasn't even sure there was anything to say that wouldn't just end up patronizing, too little to even scratch the surface of how much'd been lost.

All he managed was an occasional awkward shoulder-pat, ignoring the way his trapped and awkwardly twisted leg was falling asleep. 

After a while it slowly began to settle, until there was a good couple minutes where she was just leaning against him, face still buried, staying still. 

He wasn't sure what was going on until she did finally put effort into standing straight and pulling away - she hadn't moved until she was able to scrape some kind of composure back together, even with her face damp and her hair mussed, stray bits fraying out erratically where it was kept tied back. "I - ...should apologize, I know this is a hard time for you..."

"...It's fine." Nothing was fine, but none of it was her fault, and she had just as much reason to be Not Okay. He definitely wasn't about to start bothering her with his struggle trying to scrape himself together.

She smoothed back some of the flyaways, shrinking back into the doorway. "I should - probably go, I know you're still recovering from everything." 

He definitely wasn't in any kind of place to be any help, and she at least seemed a little better at managing to talk to people. He nodded, looking away to try to detangle his foot. 

The door closing left him alone in the lion, with no distractions from awareness of Red all but tiredly flopping on him mentally, long-suffering and weary. 

***********************************

The Castle came back online enough to move out of just hiding, brought into the thick clouds of a nearby gas giant to collect some kind of raw minerals and other compounds to feed its self-repair systems. Most of the lions recovered enough to right themselves, Black still slumped in a sprawl. 

Enough was online for Keith to fall into a routine. He wasn't minding schedules so much, mechanically going through the motions of getting food, sleeping, showering, picking on the Guardian in the training bay, and running simulation drills with Red. The lion was sure that there had to be something he could be doing with himself more than that, but that conversation led to an impasse every time. He wasn't technically inclined enough to be more than an extra set of hands for the repairs, he vehemently didn't want to try to talk to any of the others about Shiro or what'd happened, Red wasn't recovered enough to try to go looking. 

Pidge had looked like she was almost about to ask him something a few times and then thought better of it when they'd met in passing; he had no idea what it could've been about - it wasn't like he knew anything useful. Coran still showed up regularly to shove food into his hands, occasionally chattering at him or asking a few general questions about how he was feeling. One or another of the mice would pop up periodically, curling up in his collar for a while. 

Kolivan had started ghosting around, stepping in occasionally when he was in the training bay to prod at his stance or technique, tweaking the drone's routines and a few times calling it off entirely to step in on practice sessions. There were bits of other things in there, attempts at going over the philosophy and mental training that was usually attached to martial arts, bits of history that Keith would've normally been all for learning, but he was having a hard time focusing on any of it enough to do more than nod through it for a few minutes until Kolivan got a perturbed look and either went back to simple physical practice or herding him to eat or rest. 

At some point in every loose cycle of being awake that passed for a 'day', he checked on Red and if the lion was back to being mobile yet.

As soon as there was a positive indication, a stronger sense of presence, he was out the hangar, even if it was just running laps around the rings of the gas giant at the highest speed the lion could manage and using larger pieces of debris for target practice. He wanted to go further - to try to chase any vague flicker he could get that might give an answer what had happened to Shiro - but the lion's state was a limit; he couldn't do much until she was more recovered. 

Somewhere in the way things were blurring together, the lion's sense of what range she could manage expanded enough to include the debris field from the fight. The Command Center itself was gone, warped back out at some point to limp off for repairs, but there was wreckage everywhere, broken off pieces of it ranging from small fragments to twisted chunks as big as some entire ships. Here and there he found a couple fragments of Zarkon's mech, broken pieces of the wings, chest, and head from where it'd taken the worst beating. 

He found a spot in the debris field and tried to focus on the thin line that would've been a connection to Shiro.

Red had misgivings, but went with him, a living set of guides as he searched for any flicker of anything that might feel like a clue. He couldn't get a direction off the impression, or even anything besides that strange trail-off; every query to the lion got uncomfortable silence and untranslatable snarls like tangled yarn and silly string. 

He could find the spot in space where the final blow had happened, lingering bits of the burst of power still hanging as if the fabric of space and time were still vibrating from it, Shiro and Zarkon's energy covering the area like blood splatters. 

Something had twisted and torn; Shiro had been absolutely focused on putting an end to Zarkon, striking at whatever unnatural force kept the Galra Emperor alive, and Zarkon had been just as determined to remove the challenge to his power, lashing back like a dying, rabid animal. 

He managed, once, after a few hours and hitting a stage where he wasn't sure he was even entirely awake, to find the drabbled trail where the wrecked mech must've been drug back into the Command Center, Zarkon's energy still dribbling out weakly. There was something else he couldn't quite focus enough on to get a good read on, but it reminded him of both the fights with Druids and the Komar's strike.

Red filled in the trail ending on the lingering hyperspace signature where the Command Center had left. 

There was a long few minutes where both Paladin and Lion were floating in space, staring at the lingering remnants found in a slurry of half-dead sleep-deprivation and obsessive scouring. 

Keith thunked his helmet back against the seat. "...Please tell me this doesn't mean he might still be alive." 

The lion rumbled; by all rights she was fairly sure it should've killed him, the impression translating into the image of the blood smears left behind when dragging a corpse, but even she wasn't entirely sure now - they'd been sure he was dead before. 

He stared at the blank patch of the void of space where the Command Center had last been before it left, and decided to make one last sweep for any signs of which direction Shiro's energy had gone before heading back to the Castle to rest. 

************************

Spending as long as he could scouring the debris for anything that might point towards Shiro became a routine. 

Nothing changed. Hours stretched into days, trying to focus on what would be the line to Shiro as if it would work like a dowsing rod or detector, scraping for any sign of which direction Shiro’s energy had gone after the battle. He made daily checks on the Black Lion, waiting for it to wake up.

The Black Lion could teleport. They’d warped space and time in that fight.

Shiro could be anywhere, and with the condition they’d all been in, there was no guarantee there’d been any control over where he ended up.

All he needed was some small clue, anything to give a pointer in some direction. He hadn’t gone through all of that just to lose Shiro to this. Shiro would’ve been just as disoriented and flattened as the rest of them after the Komar, and if he’d ended up stranded again, or anywhere the Galra might find him -

Keith wasn’t going to gamble on Shiro being okay when the odds were that high that he’d need help. 

Red kept trying to nudge him back to the Castle;that he wasn’t going to get anywhere this way, he was needed elsewhere, he wasn’t accomplishing anything but torturing himself. 

He didn’t have any better ideas, and he couldn’t abandon Shiro, not after everything Shiro had done for him, not after everything he'd already done to defy the odds, not when they'd finally achieved something that was supposed to be a _victory_.

****************************************

" _Maybe it's time to find a new pilot for the Black Lion._ "

Keith had stormed out, the entire thing snarling in his head. He _couldn't_ abandon Shiro; the first and for a long time only person he'd managed to trust, the only person for a long time that had cared about what happened to him or seen him as anything other than an arrogant troublemaker and a problem case - 

Replacing Shiro to just be forgotten and left behind was enough to make him feel queasy, simultaneously like he needed to scream and hit something or just find some kind of small hiding place to stop existing. Where he would've been if Shiro hadn't been there was never a _good_ train of thought; he'd have been thrown out of the Garrison in the first month while the others who'd made a hobby of picking on him went on to continue being the darlings of everyone in authority, he probably would've ended up in and out of mental hospitals, aged out of the system into the desert somewhere alone - 

He wasn't even sure he'd be _alive_ anymore; he'd been running dangerously low on any sense there was a point to his existence, and scraping out an existence off the land in the desert hoping for aliens to show up one day to find some kind of answer wasn't a life, it was a reminder of how he'd been left behind by everything, that no matter what he did it wasn't good enough.

There was a swarm of little nags he didn't want to face - the idea of replacing Shiro was bad enough, but the Black Lion had moved for him once now, and he knew what Shiro had kept prodding him about.

He'd stopped in a hallway of the Castle, fist planted in the wall where it'd stopped; his hand hurt from hitting the metal bulkhead, but it barely even registered.

"Keith?" 

He glared back over his shoulder; Pidge was hanging back in the hallway, keeping some distance, with nobody else there. "What." 

"Listen, I - know how bad this is, but..." She was shifting her weight, fidgeting with the cuffs of her jacket. 

"But what." He turned, edging back away. "You think we should just leave Shiro to whatever the Hell happened?" 

"That's not -" She wrinked her nose, shoving her glasses further up her nose. "Look, going out for hours running laps around that debris field isn't doing anything, and - the Empire hasn't gone away. We're going to get our asses handed to us once they get a response together if we don't have Voltron." 

He growled; after half a lifetime of being terrified of it getting heard and getting terrorized for it, it was weirdly freeing to not have to care so much anymore. "And we don't have Voltron without _Shiro_. That's how it's _always_ been."

Pidge frowned, looking up. "Keith, you're - you're not okay, alright? And it's hard to watch this whole self-destruct thing you've been doing." 

"You had time to notice around ditching everything looking for _your_ family?", he snapped. The Red Lion was rumbling uncomfortably in the back of his head, giving a voice to the little battered bits of him that would regret this later, but it was hard to care about that when the person who'd actually tried to ditch everyone was getting after _him_ about fixating on trying to find someone missing. 

Pidge flinched. "that's not -...look, at least - I don't know, talk to us? You know, that whole 'supposed to be a team' thing you were so angry about before." She stopped, cringing after blurting it out. "I mean - I'm _worried_ about you." She took a deep breath, and took a couple steps forward, closing part of the distance. "Let us help you." 

"I don't _need_ help," he snarled, turning to walk off. 

There was an odd tinge of panic to her voice, something more frantic and frightened than he was used to. "Keith, wait - stop pulling away-" 

She lunged forward, grabbing his wrist, and he wheeled around with an inhuman growl, pulling his hand back.

Pidge pulled back as if she'd been burned and froze, a kind of horrified panic that he picked up on even through the haze of hurt and frustrated anger he'd been stuck in, and something stuck in his head - an echo from when the Lions had been helping him try to lash back at Zarkon over the relay, the fragments of voices of their predecessors leading up to their deaths.

" _Let us help you - stop pulling away-_ "

The Red Lion was quiet; he didn't need her help pointing him at the memory of the times he'd gone to her terrified of the parallels between himself and Zarkon and had them recognized and acknowledged.

Something like this was how the last Green Paladin died. Allura'd said they'd all relived their predecessor's deaths-

He swallowed hard, looking away and shrinking in, recognition hitting like a bucket of cold water. Pidge still hadn't moved.

"...Sorry." 

Pidge blinked a couple times, pulling in a breath, and took a couple steps back; she still looked rattled, afraid of _him_ , and he was starting to feel sick about something that had nothing to do with Shiro's disappearance. 

"I didn't ...." He'd been lashing out again, and had managed to hurt someone that did mean something, this time. ".... I shouldn't have lost my temper like that. Sorry." 

Pidge was taking a couple deep breaths, smoothing her jacket nervously. "Look, just -" She made a few agitated hand gestures. "I don't even know. You turned out right, you know, I had no way to find them back then, and I never would've had a clue if I hadn't - thought about everyone else too and helped with things, and - I don't even know anymore." She fussed with her zipper, shifting weight. "...Look if I find _anything_ that _might_ be a clue to what happened to Shiro, I'll go straight to you, okay?" 

Keith nodded, numbly. "I should. Go do something. Try to clear my head." Burning off energy against the Gladiator was the only thing he could think of, although it was a little hard to muster much anger to channel when it'd been replaced with the gnawing horror that he really _did_ have that much in common with Zarkon, after all, and clearly had reason to worry about not following in Zarkon's footsteps.

Pidge grimaced with a nod. "Yeah, probably." 

Maybe not anger, but it'd still mean some drills and he could probably use focusing more on form and control anyway.

*****************************************

The morning he found the Black Lion sitting upright in its hangar, he ran back to the Red Lion, to go out and search; if the lion was awake, that meant Shiro had to be somewhere, maybe the signal would be stronger, maybe something had changed that would give him a clue.

He made another sweep of the debris field, a search pattern he could do in his sleep by now, prodding at Red. He knew the lions communicated with each other. If Black was awake, Red could get a better idea where he should be looking to find Shiro.

The Lion finally had a clear answer.

He would not find anything there, and there was nothing he could do from where he was now.

He had nothing he could do, but giving up was not an option. They just needed to hold out until they found a clue to where Shiro was or what had happened to Shiro; then they could go on and go back to having Voltron the way it _should_ be, with Shiro in the lead. 

The idea of just giving up on finding Shiro and leaving him to whatever had happened was sickening, but he wasn't sure if it was even the worst part of everything at that point. He _knew_ who the Black Lion would respond to besides Shiro, he'd known the Lion had expected _him_ to step up to the controls back when they'd been stranded and Shiro'd been in the pod and unable to get Black back in its hangar - 

And now more than ever, he was sure he was not someone that should be leading something like that, no matter what Shiro had said; he didn't want to risk it turning out like Zarkon all over again. He knew how much baggage and hurt was attached to the lion for Allura, how unfair it'd be to expect her to take up the post again, but - 

She'd be _better_ at it, she already had _some_ clue how to lead, she was _good_ at dealing with people and looking out for others; he was a mess that couldn't even take care of or look out for one person, and he didn't want to risk the chance that trying to get the Lion moving again would mean Black refusing to accept Allura and insisting _he_ take it.

That he'd end up expected to lead, and end up damning everything because he wasn't Shiro, he didn't know what he was doing, and he was still _horrible_ with people. 

They just needed to manage to hold out until he could find a clue to where Shiro was, even if half of that was shaking his end of the line out and trying to yell down it that damnit, they needed Shiro, _he_ needed Shiro, and he was ready to do whatever it took to get Shiro out of whatever he'd ended up in, no matter what that meant. 

The Lion was listening to that with quiet exasperated frustration and a deeper misgiving, but all he could get was another reminder that he had a _lot_ in common with Zarkon, and needed to mind just _how much_ \- 

With no idea what that meant at this point or how to avoid it, and the one person he knew he could talk to that'd probably be able to help figure it out gone. 

*********************************

Keith knew he'd screwed up again when he left the meeting, but it was hard to focus on that when all he kept cycling back to was how _easily_ Shiro had been forgotten - how much they were up against and how insistent everyone was on _Voltron_ being the only answer, as if they hadn't just spent about a year maybe being rats at a cat convention and almost dying repeatedly.

Voltron, alone, had spent the war so far outgunned and hunted, barely managing hit and run strikes with occasional success; they hadn't managed to do anything possibly meaningful until the Blade had joined them. The _only_ way this was going to change was if it _wasn't_ just them, if all of the other planets that got a chance started fighting back - 

And now more than ever, Voltron needed to _not_ be the only thing the universe was depending on, not when they were missing the person that'd kept everything together and kept them working as a unit. 

He wasn't sure where he was going or what he was doing, and he hadn't been paying a huge amount of attention to his surroundings until his feet weren't on the ground anymore. The armor was very well designed to compensate for changing forces of gravity and direction, enough that there wasn't much discomfort to go with a clawed hand picking him up by the back of the collar. 

Kolivan wasn't saying anything, just stalking off down a different hallway, finding one of the smaller sitting rooms. 

Keith found himself unceremoniously dropped on the couch, with Kolivan standing between him and the door, frowning down at him. 

Getting literally scruffed and carried off had done a good job of popping his bubble of seething and building up that looming feeling that he'd fucked up; actually having to face Kolivan's frustrated disappointment just sank it in harder, and he shrank into the couch, scrunching into his own shoulders. 

He'd finally found a place he should've belonged and the missing part of his family, of course he was going to manage to shoot himself in the foot and screw himself out of it all. He couldn't be thrown out of Voltron as long as the Red Lion still accepted him, but he knew Red was getting increasingly frustrated with him, and his ties to the Blade were still tenuous.

"I get it. I fucked up. Again." 

Kolivan inhaled deeply with an irritable rumble. "You're lashing out and acting on impulse without any consideration for what harm it will do." 

He'd fucked up. He looked down, without any attempt at arguing or defending himself; he had no idea what he was doing anymore, had screwed up, and there wasn't really anything to do but wait for the fallout to drop. 

"Keith. Do you know why every Galran society you've encountered has emphasized discipline, self control, and some sense of structure?" Kolivan sounded firmly, calmly disappointed and controlled, which almost made it worse - made it easier for hindsight to kick in on everything he'd done wrong. 

"I've never really had a chance to know much of _anything_ about Galran society," he shot back bitterly; Kolivan might've been composed and controlled, but if there was one thing Keith had learned to loathe over the years, it was getting reprimanded for fucking up when he had no idea what he _should've_ done or how it worked. 

Kolivan had his eyes closed and there was an almost visible brief count going on even if the Blade didn't move. "I am aware, and it is becoming clear how much that lack has hindered you." 

It wasn't news to Keith; realizing he was part alien as a kid was what'd finally explained why nothing seemed to work with humans - everyone was expecting him to be something he wasn't, and getting frustrated with him when he was bad at it. 

And the only person who could've taught him how to be what he _was_ had disappeared before he'd even had a chance to remember her. The worst part of finding the Blade was that now he couldn't even manage to be properly angry at that, because as awful as it'd been, the alternative probably would've been the Empire on Earth, and he knew he'd never be as important as keeping that devastation away from a planet full of people that would've been basically helpless. 

"I need you to breathe - slowly - until you think you can listen to me." 

"So 'just getting it over with' isn't an option?" He glanced up; 'think about what you did' wasn't a new concept to him.

Kolivan just looked even more tiredly frazzled. "I'd rather not waste time trying to explain things to someone that is more interested in snarling at everything than listening." 

Keith glowered over, then turned to sit straighter, making a point of taking a couple slow, deep breaths. 

Kolivan folded his arms, arcing an eyebrow in clear recognition of how much malicious compliance Keith was hanging onto. "Are you going to listen?" 

"Not like I have anything better to do." Besides maybe trying to burn energy on the Gladiator or going out to the debris field again; Red prodded him in warning; he sank in more of a guilty sulk at the lion's nudge. 

"Well, if I have learned anything from your behavior over the last few phoebs, you're as Galra in spirit as you are human in looks." It was faintly frustrated and wearily chagrined. "I had thought there would be time to teach you what that _meant_ properly after the battle, but I underestimated how soon you would need it." 

It was not any form of the directions he'd expected Kolivan to take, even if he could still pick up on Kolivan dearly wanting to pick him up and shake him somewhere in that composure. 

"How important do human cultures hold self control and focus?" 

Very much not any kind of direction he'd expected Kolivan to take. "...Uh. Pretty important, I ...guess? It depends?" He shrugged. "Military's military, and the Garrison was partly repurposed military." 

Kolivan was studying him. "Is the Garrison what raised you?" 

Keith gave a tentative, uncertain head shake. "Training started around fourteen. I'd been in and out of foster care and group homes before that for years." 

There was _something_ Kolivan was trying to piece together. "Is that normal for humans?" 

Keith shook his head. 

Kolivan raised an eyebrow, tilting his head for explanation.

Keith took in a breath. ".....Most humans get raised by their parents. My Dad died when I was still pretty young, and Mom..." He trailed off, just putting a hand over the compartment where he kept the blade tucked in the Paladin armor; he was pretty sure Kolivan at least had a good guess who his mother was, if not knew specifically, even if he was half afraid to go after that answer. 

Kolivan buried his face in one hand, rubbing his temples with a low grumble. "How old were you when she left."

Definitely knew who his mother was. "Too young to remember anything." 

"So you were orphaned and passed around for several years before finally ending up in a ... pseudo-military academy." Kolivan's frustration had turned into a thousand yard stare. 

Keith nodded. 

"I suppose your time at this ... Garrison did not go smoothly." 

Keith shook his head slowly, ducking down, unsure. "...There were a few times Shiro was the only reason I didn't get kicked out - before he was gone, and I did." 

Kolivan's frustrated rumble actually had a faint little rusted whine to it, finally heaving a sigh and patching his posture back. “Contrary to Imperial dogmas, we are not a species that rose to power solely by fighting amongst ourselves until the strongest rose to the top to establish a forced order.” 

Keith rolled his eyes with a snort; that was something he was sure wasn’t that different from the history of any human dictatorship. 

“Galra form incredibly intense bonds within small groups. Our survival before we had even discovered language depended on our ability to cooperate, coordinate, and cover each other to overcome obstacles none of us could have survived alone.” 

“Social species. Language and complex communication doesn’t evolve without a reason for it; solitary species don’t need it, so only social species benefit from it.” He could deal with an impromptu classroom lecture, even if some of it wasn’t new ideas at all. He’d already caught some emphasis that slanted towards pack predators.

“When we learned to maintain more stable sources of food and gather in larger groups, it became a weakness as well as a strength. Strong loyalty to a select few easily turns into hostility towards anything outside that group, and conflicts between individuals escalate quickly. Even the Empire maintains enough to acknowledge that we spent our early history before spaceflight as scattered tribes caught up in constant warfare.” 

There was a brief pointed glance, just enough for Keith to sink a little recognizing the beginning of the point. 

“Any large group of Galra, _particularly_ warriors, learns some form of discipline, self-control, and to focus on a larger sense of identity and larger goals, because that is what keeps us from breaking apart into petty bickering and pointless bloodshed - or falling apart completely and taking others with us if something disrupts anything important to us.” The pointed glance turned into a fixed stare. “Your outbursts could jeopardize _billions_ , undermining our efforts to pull together something that could stand against the Empire.” 

Keith shrank back into the couch, looking away. Reminders of the scale of what they were dealing with just left him more sure that he had to find Shiro - not just for all of the personal reasons and not wanting to think about giving up on him after all of that, but because he didn't want to risk the Black Lion deciding to go along with Shiro's insistence that he should take over. 

Kolivan had another faint, uncomfortable rumble. "I can't do anything to address this if you're sitting on everything." 

"It doesn't matter." There was a list of things there that he didn't want to talk about. 

"With what's at stake, I would say it does." 

He wasn't even sure what to make of this - Kolivan had rank in an organization that relied on strict discipline, and Keith was very familiar with running into consequences when he'd snapped at something or gotten frustrated and acted out - trying to explain himself only ever made things worse, and Kolivan was cornering him into that without other options. He shifted, curling in a little more and glancing up; Kolivan was still, showing no signs of moving or budging. 

"...We should be trying to find Shiro." 

"Have you found anything in your attempts at searching that any of us could use?" 

It was more that didn't fit anything Keith was used to; he almost went to worry at the backs of his gloves, ending up running fingers across the top of the armor's gauntlets. "...I don't know. I don't think so - not yet at least." 

Kolivan stayed waiting.

He swallowed after a minute of quiet. "It - I can find the exact spot in space where we struck the last blow on Zarkon, there's all kinds of weird power lingering around it, and Shiro and Zarkon's energy is just...scattered all over the place like blood stains, but - I can't find any trace of Shiro away from that, just.... all the weird burst from whatever the Black Lion _did_ with the rest of us.... it was like we - phased _through_ Zarkon's mech. It teleported. I keep thinking there has to be something that'd give a clue where he _is_ now, but..." 

"So you think Shiro ended up thrown somewhere in the power struggle." It sounded like Kolivan was thinking it over, at least. 

"Or that Haggar did something to grab him. There's not anything else it _could_ be, right?" It came out way more panicked than he'd wanted to sound.

Kolivan frowned. "We don't have an incredible amount of information on the lions and the powers surrounding them. Throwing one's own quintessence into any kind of channel can be dangerous, particularly after what you went through with the Komar, and the blow you struck against Zarkon was a massive amount of power. If there isn't any kind of signature trail the Red Lion can trace, then we may not know for certain for some time, unless we manage to trip over him or the Black Lion itself can give us an explanation." Kolivan had kept a careful, almost gently cautious tone for the entire thing, but it didn't do much to lessen the implication that Shiro might be dead.

"It can't-", Keith started to snap, then stopped, shaking his head. "No, it's - I saw part of Alfor's memory, I know what it feels like when one of the others is dead from that, there's still something on whatever ties all of us together, I just - can't pick up on anything, like it's too far away or it's blocked or something's wrong. He's _somewhere_ , and - the Red Lion knows something, but every time she's tried to tell me, it just - locks up in this big mess, like it's not translating to anything I could understand." 

Kolivan paused, blinking, with a slow nod; it'd apparently been a lot to dump all at once. "...Are you capable of communicating with the other lions?"

Keith winced; he didn't want to talk about Black responding to him before, or Shiro's insistence on him taking over. "I - ....not real-...kind of?" He looked up with a helpless shrug. "I mean, if I'm in one of them, I can feel them a little, but it's not the same, so if my connection to Red isn't solid enough to understand what _she's_ trying to say..."

"...Then asking the Black Lion directly isn't an option." Kolivan shook his head slowly, looking down in thought. "We will keep an eye out for any word or sign of Shiro. I can't promise there will be results - if he was thrown elsewhere, he could easily manage to be in a blind spot on our network, and if the witch managed enough power to meddle..." Kolivan wrinkled his nose, a few points of teeth showing irritably. "We've only had one operative manage to get inside her operations long enough to do anything of use in our entire history."

Ulaz.

"I don't have anyone in any position to try, and even if I did, it would end in sending someone to their death without any actual information gained." 

He didn't like it, but he couldn't ask Kolivan to send someone on a suicide run, especially when there was little chance of it doing anything; he nodded.

"Are you making any progress with your continued searching?" 

Keith opened his mouth, then closed it, looking down.

Kolivan inhaled deeply for a moment. "If you've exhausted everything you can find by scouring the debris field, then it's time to start considering other options rather than wasting energy trying to wring a stone - and that may mean keeping your eyes open while you focus on taking care of the immediate problems until you can find a better opportunity to find out what happened to him." 

It was incredibly rational, reasonable, and logical, and he hated it. "If she got her hands on him again, or he landed somewhere in danger, then there might not be _time_ for that!"

One of Kolivan's ears twitched. "If he's in danger, then panicking over it continually at your own expense will ruin any chance you have to help him - and if he's gone, then refusing to deal with everything else will mean throwing away everything he fought and died for." 

There was a faint growl to it, and Keith had the suspicion he'd found a nerve. 

"I also cannot imagine that he'd want you rejecting all other responsibilities like this." 

Keith hunched his shoulders, folding his arms, shooting Kolivan a filthy look. "Shiro's horrible at taking care of himself to begin with, he'd say I should be trying to help someone else even if he was bleeding out and they'd stubbed their toe." 

Kolivan glared back with a growl. "You're being pedantic. If he's still out there, what answer do you want to have for what you did while he was missing?" 

He shrank back into another upset sulk; he didn't _need_ Kolivan being an external voice for his conscience. 

"If you want to help him, make sure your search efforts are actually accomplishing something beyond cycling your own panic - and take care of everything that was important to him while he cannot." 

That was exactly what he was afraid of. "I'm not taking his place," he snarled, teeth clenched. 

It seemed to be another moment of catching Kolivan off guard, and earned him a moment where Kolivan was visibly recalculating, studying him. "If it comes to that, it will be the lions' decision, not any of ours." 

He huffed out a breath, deflating. There wasn't really anything he could say to that.

"Next time your emotions are getting the better of you, try to remember what you're actually trying to accomplish - and mind that what you're about to do will actually do something to get there, before you sabotage yourself, him, and all of us any further." 

"I'll try." Everything Kolivan said made _sense_ , even if he wanted to be able to just shake the universe until things went back to the way they were supposed to be, with Shiro there. 

"The Empire isn't going to give you much time to learn." Kolivan waited, giving him a couple minutes; he didn't even look up. "I need to go help see what can be done with everything; try to remember what Shiro would actually want." 

Keith sat for a long time after the Blade leader left, staring at the end of the couch, miserable and numb even with Red settled mentally against him. The lion was staying quiet, with little to offer besides presence and contact. 

***************************

Eventually he did get moving, wandering the halls of the Castle aimlessly. It was a huge ship, really; big enough to carry a decent sized town's worth of crew. The weird echo of the previous Red Paladin was slowly dimming out, but there was still enough to have an underlayer of awareness how wrong it was for the ship to be _empty_ , vague flickers of ambient memory. It should have been a settled population unto itself, busy and full of voices. 

Now, it was basically a ghost ship, an emptiness that brought up other flickers of wrong; blood-splattered hallways littered with corpses from the crew turning on each other in suddenly divided loyalties. 

Eventually he found himself standing outside the Black Lion's hangar; he stared at the door, feeling his stomach twist before he took a deep breath and walked in. Maybe it was worth trying to see if Black had an answer, now that the lion was awake.

He froze as soon as he got inside when there was already another voice. 

"-really are just a bunch of kids out here. I mean, we've been doing a lot, it's great, people love us - mostly - but..." 

He couldn't see Lance, and the large vaulted chamber made it hard to gauge direction, but his best guess was that Lance was sitting somewhere on one of Black's claws, out of line of sight of the door; there was no sign Lance had even noticed one of the hallway entrances opening and closing. 

"It's still... like none of us really know what we're doing sometimes. We need - okay no. _KEITH_ needs you. He just fell apart, like his whole brain fell out of his skull the second you disappeared. He's been a basket case this whole time, worse than the rest of us. We're all just ..." Lance trailed off for a minute; Keith shifted weight by the door, not wanting to intrude and not wanting to risk disturbing Lance by opening the door again to leave. "It's the not knowing thing. Like we're all just waiting for you to get back - any minute you're just going to walk in from the hangar or radio us to come get you or something. I mean, we beat Zarkon! That means we won, right? And things are supposed to get better?" 

The question hung in the air for a few seconds. "They kind of are, there's planets breaking free all over, but - some days it just feels like it's some kind of fake lull, and things are just going to get worse somehow. And ... if we did really win ... you should be here." 

The hangar went silent, and Keith shifted weight again, unsure if he should say something or just sneak out. 

Then there was the sound of feet hitting the metal floor of the hangar as Lance dropped down from wherever he'd been perched, and footsteps going around the lion, and Keith froze, stuck in a moment of panic.

Lance came around one of the lion's giant paws, freezing himself as he noticed Keith, with a long, awkward stare.

"...Keith?" 

He stiffened, making a short awkward gesture in the air.

"Did you hear-"

Keith took two steps back, only pausing for the door to open behind him before he turned and hurried away, to find anywhere else on the ship to be.


End file.
